Old world, new grid [grid computing]

The European Union has launched the EGEE (enabling grids for e-science) initiative which aims to build a massive global grid infrastructure that serves as a tool capable of solving a great variety of problems in science, engineering and industry. The EGEE grid combines the processing power of more than 20,000 CPUs, a storage capacity of about 5 million GB and a global network connecting some 200 sites in various places around the globe. The EGEE grid builds on the experience of the LHC grid which was built by CERN researchers to handle the vast amount of data generated by the operation of the large Hadron collider in an underground complex in Switzerland. The EGEE grid is already crunching test data for the LHC experiments and also for dozens of applications in such areas as astrophysics, medical imaging, bioinformatics, climate studies, oil and gas exploration, pharmaceutical research, and financial forecasting.