EGEE News - December 2004
 ________________________________________________
 Hot Topics
 EGEE-02 Follow-Up
The EGEE Project Management would like to thank all EGEE members who contributed to the second EGEE conference, which was a very successful event, attended by more than 400 people. The cross-activity meetings were most appreciated and the feedback shows that all members made the most of the working time there. The outcome of the conference shows encouraging signs that the EGEE collaboration, with its dynamic partners, will secure a continuation of the ground breaking work in many years to come.

EU Review
December 2004 marks the end of the first reporting period of the project and all activities are now busy ensuring that reports and deliverables are ready in time for submission to the EGEE project reviewers on 20 January 2005. The schedule is tight, and the response by all persons involved examplary.

Attention now turns to the preparation of the first EGEE review. The full details of the review are featured on the new website, now live at http://egee-intranet.web.cern.ch/egee-intranet/EU_Review/index.html . Please note that space is limited for attending the official event, however, different rehearsals are foreseen which you can attend if you so wish, one of which, the Dress Rehearsal on 2-4 February will be broadcast via VRVS. This review is of paramount importance to the project, as it marks the end of the first period of the project which will be critically assessed by the five reviewers appointed by the EU.

EGEE Success Stories
 Applications
One of the main goals of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE is to foster a multi-science grid by identifying a wide range of scientific disciplines and their applications and supporting a promising selected number of these for deployment. The following new applications have been successfully demonstrated during the Second EGEE Conference in The Hague, namely Computational Chemistry, Astrophysics, Multimedia, Earth Science, and Medicine(e.g. imaging, analysis, diagnostics).

By the end of October, already more than 30,000 CPU hours had been used excluding the HEP LHC experiments, which remain the principal infrastructure customers with about a thousand times as many CPU hours since the start of the project. While most of these CPU hours and their corresponding 20,000 jobs come from active users of the biomedical Virtual Organisations (VOs) (the second pilot application beside HEP), Earth Science applications are now starting to use the production infrastructure. The EGEE project has attracted the first application deployed by an industrial partner, the french Compagnie GÈnÈrale de Geophysique (CGG): EGEODE.

Several research communities have applied to the EGEE Generic Applications Advisory Panel (EGAAP), in charge of evaluating requests for deployment and making recommendations to the project. Drug discovery, cosmology and digital libraries are the newly approved disciplines invited to take advantage of the services offered by EGEE.

While EGEE s major focus is on providing a production quality grid infrastructure, there are many ways EGEE can collaborate with existing application-focused grid projects beyond deployment:

- Some like Mammogrid have expressed interest for using EGEE middleware to deploy their own infrastructure.

- Others like Mygrid are showing interest in deploying on EGEE the high level services or the platforms they are or have been developing.

- Others are interested in joint deployment of applications and/or exchange of technology.

GILDA
From the start, the EGEE Project adopted the Grid INFN Laboratory for Dissemination Activities (GILDA, https://gilda.ct.infn.it ) as its official dissemination and training tool. In the 30 weeks since the project s start, more than 20 induction courses, tutorials, and demonstrations have been performed using GILDA. More than 500 people have been trained. GILDA is also the grid testbed where applications of new communities can be interfaced and tested with the EGEE production middleware.
 ___________________________________
 EGEE in Numbers 
As reported by the EGEE information system, the production service gives access to a total of about 4.7 petabytes. This corresponds to 6.5 million CDs 2.5mm thick, which amounts to a stack of CDs 16KM high. The data is available on disk and high density tape storage (NOT on CDs).
___________________________________
 EGEE in the Press
The project was highlighted in an article in the magazine "The Economist" on Grid Computing called "A Grid by another Name", which appeared in the 2 December edition of the print version. The story can be found at http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3423065.

EGEE was also a topic in Jeremy Rifkin's current bestseller "The European Dream, How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream". The text refers to EGEE as "the largest international grid infrastructure in the world."  

Jeremy Rifkin is the founder and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, DC. He is also author and currently serves as an advisor to Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, the governing body of the European Union.

Please view the EGEE press cuttings at http://public.eu-egee.org/cuttings.