The Russian consortium RDIG (Russian Data Intensive Grid, www.egee-rdig.ru) was set up in September 2003 to create Grid infrastructure for intensive scientific data operations. Such infrastructure is necessary for the participation of Russian scientists in experiments in high energy physics, in chemical physics and biology, in earth sciences and other scientific applications. By the end of 2006 year the following institutes are involved into the RDIG activities: Kurchatov Institute (Moscow, www.kiae.ru), the Institute of High Energy Physics (Protvino, www.ihep.su), Institute of Mathematical Problems in Biology RAS (Pushchino, www.impb.ru), Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (Moscow, www.itep.ru), Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, www.jinr.ru), Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics RAS (Moscow, www.keldysh.ru), Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics at MSU (Moscow, www.sinp.msu.ru), St-Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics RAS (Gatchina, www.pnpi.spb.ru), Institute for Nuclear Research RAS (Troitsk, www.inr.ru), Lebedev Physical Institute RAS (Moscow, www.lebedev.ru), St-Petersburg State University (www.spbu.ru), Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (State University) (www.mephi.ru), Geophysical Center RAS (Moscow, www.wdcb.ru/GCRAS/welcome.html), Novgorod State University (Velikii Novgorod, www.novsu.ru) and Institute of problems of Chemical Physics RAS (Chernogolovka, www.icp.ac.ru). RDIG participates in the EGEE structure as a regional federation providing Russia's full-scale participation in this global grid project.

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is the largest multi-disciplinary grid infrastructure in the world, which brings together more than 120 organisations to produce a reliable and scalable computing resource available to the European and global research community. At present, it consists of 250 sites in 48 countries and more than 68,000 CPUs available to some 8,000 users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

EGEE-III, co-funded by the European Commission, aims to expand and optimise the Grid infrastructure, which currently processes more than 150, 000 jobs per day from scientific domains ranging from biomedicine to fusion science. The EGEE Grid infrastructure is ideal for any scientific research, especially for projects where the time and resources needed for running the applications are considered impractical when using traditional IT infrastructures.

Objectives

• To expand and optimise Europe's largest production Grid infrastructure, namely EGEE, by continuous operation of the infrastructure, support for more user communities, and addition of further computational and data resources.
• To prepare the migration of the existing production European Grid from a project-based model to a sustainable federated infrastructure based on National Grid Initiatives for multi-disciplinary use.

Results

Funded by the European Commission, the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project is the flagship Grid infrastructure project of the EU. The third two-year phase of the project started on 1 May 2008 and includes:

• A Grid infrastructure spanning about 250 sites across 50 countries
• An infrastructure of more than 68,000 CPU available to users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
• More than 20 Petabytes (20 million Gigabytes) of storage.
• Sustained & regular workloads of 30K jobs/day, reaching up to 150K jobs/day
• Massive data transfers > 1.5 GB/s
• User Support including:
  • A single access point for support, a portal with well structured information and updated documentation; knowledgeable experts; correct, complete and responsive support; tools to help resolve problems.
• Security & Policy, including:
  • Authentication (Use of GSI, X.509 certificates generally issued by national certification authorities)
  • Agreed network of trust (International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF), EUGridPMA, APGridPMA, TAGPMA)
  • All EGEE sites will usually trust all IGTF root CAs

EGEE in real time

The Real Time Monitor gives an idea of the power of EGEE by displaying all jobs submitted through the Resource Brokers displayed. These Resource Brokers are being monitored directly through a mySQL database connection. Since this information is continually updated, job movement around the world map is seen in real time, along with changes in status. You can also see the Monitoring Frameworks through the Grid Operations Centre GIIS Monitor.

EGEE Applications

As well as the enormous processing power available, a series of applications have been successfuly deployed and used on the EGEE Grid infrastructure.

EGEE supports applications from many scientific domains, such as astrophysics, biomedicine, computational chemistry, earth sciences, high energy physics, finance, fusion, geophysics and multimedia. In addition, there are several applications from business sectors running on the EGEE Grid, such as applications from geophysics and the plastics industry.