The EGEE project brings together experts from over 32 countries with the common aim of building on recent advances in Grid technology and developing a service Grid infrastructure which is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day.

The project provides researchers in academia and industry with access to a production level Grid infrastructure, independent of their geographic location. The EGEE project also focuses on attracting a wide range of new users to the Grid.

The EGEE project concentrates on some core areas:

• To continuously improve and maintain the middleware in order to deliver a reliable service to users.
• To attract new users from industry as well as science and ensure they receive the high standard of training and support they need.
• To combine national, regional and thematic Grid efforts, for a seamless Grid infrastructure for scientific research and to build a sustainable Grid for business research and industry.

Project Director, Bob Jones, said:

"EGEE is providing a production quality Grid infrastructure spanning more than 30 countries with over 150 sites to a myriad of applications from various scientific domains, including Earth Sciences, High Energy Physics, Bioinformatics and Astrophysics".

Generally, the EGEE Grid infrastructure is ideal for any scientific research especially where the time and resources needed for running the applications are considered impractical when using traditional IT infrastructures. The EGEE Grid consists of over 30,000 CPU available to users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in addition to more than 5 Petabytes (5 million Gigabytes) of storage, and maintains 30,000 concurrent jobs on average.

Having such resources available changes the way scientific research takes place. End use depends on the users' needs: large storage capacity, the bandwidth that the infrastructure provides, or the sheer computing power available.

The first applications to use the EGEE Grid infrastructure were from the fields of High Energy Physics (HEP) and Biomedicine, but EGEE now also supports applications from many other scientific domains, such as Astrophysics, Computational Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Finance, Fusion, Geophysics, Multimedia. In addition, there are several applications from the industrial sector running on the EGEE Grid, such as applications from geophysics and the plastics industry.

At present there are about 20 applications from more than 10 domains on the EGEE Grid infrastructure.