First EGEE-III Memorandum of Understanding signed today with the EDGeS project

Bob Jones, EGEE Project Director and Peter Kacsuk, Project Director of EDGeS from the Hungarian Academia of Sciences today signed the first Memorandum of Understanding of EGEE-III.

EDGeS, Enabling Desktop Grids for e-Science, is a European project that aims to create an integrated grid infrastructure across Europe. It will build a two way bridge between Desktop Grids, as used by the SETI@home project, made up of hundreds of thousands of PCs, with service grids such as the computing cluster-based EGEE.

With the impressive Bosphorus Bridge clearly visible from the conference centre, building bridges is an emerging theme for EGEE’08, from grid to grid, and from EGEE to the future with the European Grid Initiative.

Porting an application to the Grid can be a complex task. Writing a programme to run on around 300,000 computers making up the ‘volunteer’ grid is not easy - the EDGeS project also offers support for two main types of Desktop Grid middleware: BOINC and XtremWeb.

Another barrier that users face is that they either have to choose between a Service Grid such as the gLite based EGEE, or a Desktop Grid. At the moment, there is no way to seamlessly integrate these on a European scale. The EDGeS projects aims to solve this by providing a bridge that will allow these Grids to connect. For grid users, this means they no longer have to make a choice between the two: programs that are best suited to a Desktop Grid can be run on a BOINC or XtremWeb based Grid, programs that are better suited to Service Grids such as EGEE can be run there.

Part of EDGeS's remit is to seek out applications that would benefit from running over Desktop Grids, looking to the worlds of fusion, biomedicine, engineering, chemistry and industry. For EGEE, this means that EDGeS will open up new and interesting applications, freeing up cluster resources if jobs can run on the Desktop Grid instead. The Desktop Grid community will expand and also benefit from the high end cluster computing resources offered by the grid, when they are available. By integrating existing national and international Service Grids and Desktop Grids, EDGeS will contribute to the vision of a sustainable Grid infrastructure in Europe, one of the main talking points for EGEE’08 this year.