EGEE Project
UCL contributes to Enable the Grid in Europe
University College London (UCL) is one of the partners in the European Union that will take part in the EGEE (Enabling Grids for e-Science in Europe) project led by CERN. The aim of EGEE is to integrate current national, regional and thematic Grid efforts, in order to create a seamless European Grid infrastructure for the Research community.
The EGEE consortium involves 70 leading institutions in 27 countries, federated in regional Grids, with a combined capacity of over 20000 CPUs, the largest international Grid infrastructure ever assembled
The EGEE vision is to provide distributed European research communities with a common market of computing, offering round-the-clock access to major computing resources, independent of geographic location, building on the EU Research Network Geant and the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). EGEE will support common Grid computing needs, integrate the computing infrastructures of these communities and agree on common access policies. The resulting infrastructure will surpass the capabilities of localised clusters and individual supercomputing centres, providing a unique tool for collaborative computer and data intensive e-Science. EGEE will work to provide interoperability with other major Grid initiatives such as the US NSF Cyberinfrastructure, establishing a worldwide Grid infrastructure.
EGEE is a two-year project in a four-year program. Two pilot applications areas have been selected to guide the implementation and certify the performance of EGEE: the Particle Physics LHC Grid (LCG), where the computing model is based exclusively on a Grid infrastructure to store and analyse petabytes of data from experiments at CERN; Biomedical Grids, where several communities are facing equally daunting challenges to cope with the flood of bioinformatics and healthcare data, such as the proposed HealthGrid association.
UCL, through its "Network Centre of Excellence" and its "High Energy Particle Physics Group" is responsible for delivering one of the "Joint Research Activities" (JRA4) inside EGEE. Partners like the French research organization CNRS/UREC, the pan-European, German and Italian research network manager DANTE, DFN and GARR respectively, will also contribute with its extended expertise to this effort.
This activity will deploy advanced wide area network services in the context of distributed Grid computing. The work is centered upon the need to provide Grid accessible services for (i) network performance measurement and diagnostic tools, and (ii) end-to-end allocation and reservation of network resources such us IP premium bandwidth or Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) paths. One of the challenges in these two sub-activities is enabling both services across multiple administrative domains; that is the different NRENs and the pan-European core network GÉANT. That requires a new signaling platform to allow transparency running the services in the different domains. This signaling platform will take care for instance of authorization and authentication of the users, regardless of their location, reserving the network resources such us bandwidth capacity they need to run the experiments.
Further information regarding EGEE can be found at www.eu-egee.org.
Regarding the activity JRA4 at http://egee-jra4.web.cern.ch/EGEE-JRA4/
Copyright © 2004-2012 UCL HEP group, (last modified 01 Apr 2004)
