Commissioner Reding hails landmark success of Grid infrastructure project
The global Grid infrastructure for science provided by the EU funded 'enabling Grids for e-science' (EGEE) project has surpassed two million computing jobs, or the equivalent of more than 1,000 years of processing on a single PC. The EGEE infrastructure spans over 150 sites in 40 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia, and is linked by Europe's GEANT high-speed communications network and similar networks around the world. The project was launched 18 months ago, and already 1,000 scientists are using the infrastructure to accelerate computing tasks in numerous scientific domains from particle physics to anti-malaria drug discovery. On a visit to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which coordinates the EGEE project, Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding said: 'On hearing about EGEE's achievements, I wanted to see for myself some of the practical benefits that this Grid technology is providing. I'm very satisfied to see such a major step forward in collaborative computing between scientists across Europe and even on a global scale. Europe's strategic investments in Grids and in the GEANT network infrastructure are certainly already paying dividends.' Fabrizio Gagliardi, the EGEE project director at CERN, added: 'The results for EGEE so far are very satisfying, and well beyond our initial expectations. Clearly the Grid is a service that will allow many scientists to do calculations that were once hugely time consuming much faster.' Mr Gagliardi gave the example of a group working to develop drugs for malaria that had managed to reduce computer simulations of 46 million potential drug candidates (the equivalent of 80 years work on a single PC, to just a few months of work on the EGEE Grid. The ultimate aim of the EGEE project is to develop a service Grid infrastructure that is available to scientists 24 hours a day, providing researchers in both industry and academia with access to major computing resources regardless of their geographic location.