EU funds the Grid
'The Grid', the next generation of the world wide web, is set to receive 9.8 million euro of funds from the European Commission's Fifth RTD Framework programme. The funds will come from the Information Society Technologies programme (IST). Researchers working on the Grid hope to produce a system, which is able to cope better with the increasing flow of information in cyberspace. The high speed network would link people with collaborative tools and supercomputers, processor farms, disks, major databases and informatics. At last year's Lisbon summit, European leaders agreed to launch the DataGrid initiative with the objective of developing a dedicated network for European science applications research. The aim is to develop and demonstrate an informatic architecture distributed throughout Europe by high-rate data transmission links. The EU contribution to the project will be spread over 3 years and a contract has been awarded to the Swiss-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) as project leader. There are five other partners, including: the centre national de la recherche scientique (CNRS, France); the European Space Agency's centre in Frascati, Italy (ESA/ESRIN); the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN, Italy); the Dutch National Institute for Nuclear physics and high energy physics (NIKHEF, The Netherlands); and the UK Particle physics and astronomy research council (PPARC). 'Through the DataGrid project, a novel distributed computing environment, specifically designed to analyse and move vast amounts of data, will be developed and deployed. It will build on emerging Grid technologies, using open source code to create a new world wide data and computational grid on a scale not previously attempted, a World Wide Grid,' reports the European Space Agency. 'This project is seen by international computing experts and EU authorities as an ideal test case for the development of a new model of world-wide distributed computing and the natural evolution of the world wide web,' adds CERN, which is counting on using the DataGrid in the near future: 'One of the first challenges for the DataGrid will be to handle the mass of data generated by CERN's next accelerator the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which starts up in 2005...The computing power required to handle and process these data at CERN is estimated to be equivalent to about 100,000 of today's PC computers. At least three times the same power will be needed in the collaborating institutes world-wide. Clearly CERN and the four LHC collaborations cannot financially and practically sustain this effort...for this reason CERN is placing its trust in the Grid.'
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Andorra