Bob Jones

Building an infrastructure for scientific Grid computing: status and goals of the EGEE project

The state of computer and networking technology today makes the seamless sharing of computing resources on an international or even global scale conceivable. Scientific computing Grids that integrate large, geographically distributed computer clusters and data storage facilities are being developed in several major projects around the world. This article reviews the status of one of these projects, Enabling Grids for E-SciencE, describing the scientific opportunities that such a Grid can provide, while illustrating the scale and complexity of the challenge involved in establishing a scientific infrastructure of this kind.

European DataGrid Project: Experiences of Deploying a Large Scale Testbed for E-science Applications

The objective of the European DataGrid (EDG) project is to assist the next generation of scientific exploration, which requires intensive computation and analysis of shared large-scale datasets, from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, across widely distributed scientific communities. We see these requirements emerging in many scientific disciplines, including physics, biology, and earth sciences. Such sharing is made complicated by the distributed nature of the resources to be used, the distributed nature of the research communities, the size of the datasets and the limited network bandwidth available. To address these problems we are building on emerging computational Grid technologies to establish a research network that is developing the technology components essential for the implementation of a world-wide data and computational Grid on a scale not previously attempted. An essential part of this project is the phased development and deployment of a large-scale Grid testbed.The primary goals of the first phase of the EDG testbed were: 1) to demonstrate that the EDG software components could be integrated into a productionquality computational Grid; 2) to allow the middleware developers to evaluate the design and performance of their software; 3) to expose the technology to end-users to give them hands-on experience; and 4) to facilitate interaction and feedback between end-users and developers. This first testbed deployment was achieved towards the end of 2001 and assessed during the successful European Union review of the project on March 1, 2002. In this article we give an overview of the current status and plans of the EDG project and describe the distributed testbed.

The Organization and Management of Grid Infrastructures

Grid computing technology has become fundamental to e-Science. As the virtual organizations established by scientific communities progress from testing their applications to more routine usage, maintaining reliable and adaptive grid infrastructures becomes increasingly important.

The use of grids for fusion applications in Europe and future directions

This talk presents the progress and recent history of Grid computing in Europe using the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project as an example. EGEE is funded by the European Commission (EC) to build a multi-science Grid infrastructure for the European Research Area, and connected to other regions through collaborating infrastructures and other EC funded projects. The use of the EGEE grid by the fusion community and its collaborative work with other grid and HPC projects will be highlighted. By considering these developments, this talk will suggest some guidelines for the fusion community to make optimal use of such e-Infrastructures and position itself with respect to future grid developments.