EGEE-II builds on the work of the EGEE project, which was conceived as the first two-year phase of a four-year programme, to provide a production quality Grid infrastructure across the European Research Area and beyond. Researchers in academia and industry already benefit from the EGEE Infrastructure, which simultaneously supports many applications from diverse scientific areas. This is achieved by providing a common pool of resources, independent of geographic location, with round-the-clock access to major storage, compute and networking facilities.

The EGEE-II project significantly extends and consolidates this infrastructure, which links national, regional and thematic Grid efforts, and interoperates with other Grids around the globe. The resulting high capacity, world-wide infrastructure greatly surpasses the capabilities of local clusters and individual centres, working towards a unique and sustainable tool for collaborative, computationally intensive science (“e-Science”).

Several large- and small-scale communities already use the EGEE infrastructure as an every-day tool for their work. Applications deployed come from High Energy Physics, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences (including the industrial application EGEODE), Astrophysics, and Computational Chemistry. EGEE-II constantly works to expand the portfolio of supported applications to new disciplines.

The EGEE-II consortium consists of 91 partners from 32 countries, grouped into 13 federations and representing almost all major efforts in Europe as well as working with emerging National Grid Initiatives. The project also works with major national projects from the US and Asia and a number of related projects will extend the infrastructure further, to the Mediterranean area, Baltic States, Latin America and China. Combined with other related projects spun out from or affiliated with EGEE and EGEE-II, this demonstrates the incubator role the project has played around the world. With enthusiastic participants and a large range of related projects, EGEE-II is developing its infrastructure into a truly pervasive global platform for e-Science.