Description
At the heart of any production grid infrastructure is an operational organisation that ensures that services are delivered to meet the needs of its user communities. These services will encompass the deployment of middleware, verifying its operational effectiveness, and supporting its users as they undertake their work. For nearly a decade Europe has been pioneering the delivery of distributed computing infrastructures to support the European research community and their collaborators through a series of pioneering projects โ the European Data Grid (EDG), EGEE I, EGEE II & EGEE III. One of the key โcustomersโ of these research infrastructures is to support the pan-European research projects defined within the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures that will be the subject of the first keynote presentation by John Wood. At the heart of EGI is the federation of independent National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) into the EGI structure. The second and third keynote presentations will describe how two NGIs, the UK National Grid Service (NGS) and the Nordic DataGrid Facility (NDGF) not only support their current user base, but how they are evolving to federate their resources into the EGI model.
