The EGEE project officially ended on the 31 March 2006
EGEE II started on 1 April 2006 and the new EGEE website can be found at:
http://www.eu-egee.org
High Energy Physics Applications
High Energy Physics (HEP) is a natural user domain for Grid computing, due to the very large amounts of data it produces and the dispersed communities who need to analyse it. Therefore, the HEP community was selected as pilot application area for EGEE, guiding the implementation of the evolving Grid infrastructure, and remains one of the key user groups running jobs on the EGEE infrastructure.
The HEP community's involvement with EGEE initially came through the computing needs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator under construction by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and scheduled to start operation in 2007. This massive machine, set to be the largest scientific instrument in the world, will produce an unprecedented 15 petabytes of useful data per year, equivalent to a stack of CDs 22 kilometers high (more than 23 million CDs).
From the beginning, EGEE formed a strategic alliance with the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project, which intends to provide the massive computing power needed to process this data. This alliance provided a large number of resources to the initial EGEE infrastructure, as well as four applications representing the four different LHC experiments: ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), CMS (the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment) and LHCb (The Large Hadron Collider Beauty Experiment).
Several other HEP collaborations have joined the infrastructure, such as the US Babar (the B and B-bar experiment), CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab), and DØ (D Zero) experiments as well as the ZEUS experiment based at Germany's DESY laboratory.
In all these cases, EGEE is able to fulfill the needs of large, distributed communities with large demands for processing power and storage. As well as the benefit to the scientific communities involved, successful support for HEP has been vital in demonstrating the benefits of joining the EGEE infrastructure to other scientific communities.