The EGEE project aimed at the development of an all-European grid infrastructure was presented at the Prague seminar

The CESNET association and Masaryk University in Brno held an introductory seminar on the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-SciencE) project on 26 October in Prague. The main topic of the seminar was the all-European grid infrastructure, which is being built as part of the EGEE project that is included in the EU's 6th framework programme (see http://eu-egee.org/). The participants acquired a basic knowledge of the application areas for which this environment is designed and of how to proceed if they are interested in adapting other applications. The seminar was intended for the professional public and included a demonstration of the basics of the work in the grid environment.

The two-year EGEE project was officially launched this year in April. With a budget of more than 35 million Euros, it is aimed at interconnecting the European national, regional and topically orientated grids into a united European grid infrastructure. It will be made available to the academic subjects interested in computing or data capacities during the solution phase of the project. The project solution is participated in by 70 institutions from all European countries as well as from Russia and the U.S.A.; interest in co-operation was also expressed by several Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea. The Czech Republic is represented by the CESNET association (see http://egee.cesnet.cz/cms/opencms/cs/).

The entire infrastructure will be largely built on cluster solutions, which will comply with the portfolio of applications targeted for this type of grid. In 2004, the grid infrastructure should be built on 25 nods (centres) with a total capacity of approximately 5,000 processors and 50 terabytes on disks. At the end of the two-year project (which is already expected to be extended) about 100 centres with 50,000 processors and a disk capacity of one petabyte should be connected to the EGEE grid.

The project is divided into three mutually connected areas as follows:

• grid support services and operation;
• education and dissemination of information in the form of support activities including identification of appropriate candidate applications;
• development of middleware, i.e. software responsible for the interconnection of the individual nods that helps to create a user illusion of a united computing environment.

The Czech Republic takes part in all these basic areas; as for middleware development, it is the only participant from Central, South or South-Western Europe.

The papers presented at the seminar are available at: http://www.cesnet.cz/doc/seminare/20041026/.

The CESNET association was established by the universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in order to operate a national network for science and research. It is financed from the funds of the Government Council for Science and Research and of its members. At present, it operates the national optical gigabit network CESNET2 and works together with Canada, the Netherlands and the U.S.A. on the building of the global lambda network GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), the Czech part of which is called CzechLight. Thanks to its research activities in the field of telecommunications and Internet technologies, CESNET is the representative of the Czech Republic in the European project GÉANT, in which it takes an active part.