National Grid Seminar Series

The EGEE Grid Infrastructure Project: First Experience & Future Plans

Dr. Fabrizio Gagliardi
Division of IT/EGE, CERN

18 October 2004 (Monday)
0930 hrs @ Auditorium
Institute for Infocomm Research
21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore 119613

Abstract

The EGEE Grid infrastructure will provide European researchers in academia and industry with a common market of computing resources, enabling round-the-clock access to major computing resources, independent of geographic location. The infrastructure will support distributed research communities, including relevant Networks of Excellence, which share common Grid computing needs and are prepared to integrate their own distributed computing infrastructures and agree common access policies.

The EGEE Project involves 70 leading organisations from around 27 countries, federated in regional Grids, with an ultimate combined capacity of over 20,000 CPUs – the largest international Grid infrastructure ever assembled. EGEE will surpass the capabilities of localized clusters and individual supercomputing centres in many respects, providing a unique tool for collaborative compute-intensive science ("e-Science") in the European Research Area.

Mostly funded by European Union funding agencies, this project has a world-wide mission and receives important contributions from the US, Russia and other non EU partners. It will provide interoperability with other Grids around the globe, including the US NSF Cyber-infrastructure, and will substantially contribute to the efforts in establishing a “worldwide” Grid infrastructure.

The talk will review the status of the project, which started in April 2004, and will analyze the possible future developments of grid technology, both from the users and the developers prospective.

Biodata

Since Fabrizio Gagliardi joined CERN in 1975, after graduating in Computer Science at the University of Pisa in Italy, he has held several technical and managerial positions in this field, including:

- Leader of the European Union funded project GPMIMD2 (1993-1996). This project developed a MPP supercomputer, which was used to prototype the, by now, CERN standard Central Data Acquisition (CDR) system
- Leader of the Data Management services of the IT division (1996-1999)
- Responsible for CERN participation in the EU project Eurostore (1998 – 2000)

From January 2001 till March 2004, Fabrizio Gagliardi was the leader of the EU DataGrid project. As part of this activity, he has become one of the most active proponents of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) of which he is co-founder and now member of its International Advisory Committee.

The EGEE project (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) started on 1 April 2004. 70 partners from Europe and outside Europe (US, Russia, Israel) aim to build a large international Grid infrastructure to support production applications for the European Research Area and the rest of the international scientific community.

His activity is not limited to Europe. Since March 2001, he is member of the External Advisory Committee of the US NSF GriPhyN project (the largest US Grid project of this kind). He has been an IEEE member since 1982.

Thanks to this broad experience, Fabrizio Gagliardi is a computing expert to the EU IST programme, and in that role reviewer of EU projects and members of working groups on Grid technology and distributed computing.

Fabrizio Gagliardi is often invited as key note speaker to major international computing events. He is author and co-author of several publications on the subject of distributed and Grid computing.

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This seminar series is organized by the National Grid Office located at 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore 119613.

Admission is Free. All are Welcome.
Please email to Miss Vasugi (email: vasu@ngp.org.sg) to register a place by 1000 hours on 15 October 2004.