EELA-2 : E-Science grid facility for Europe and Latin America

EELA-2 aims at building a high capacity, production-quality, scalable Grid Facility, providing round-the-clock, worldwide access to distributed computing, storage and network resources needed by the wide spectrum of Applications from European - Latin American Scientific Collaborations, with special focus on:

• Offering a complete set of versatile services fulfilling Applications requirements;
• Ensuring the long-term sustainability of the e-Infrastructure beyond the term of the project.

Such an ambitious project would not be possible without the prior existence of a consolidated e-Infrastructure, set up with the early intention to build a sustainable Grid platform. This was the objective of the EELA Project (www.eu-eela.org/first-phase.php) that provided its users with a stable, well supported Grid Infrastructure based on 16 Resource Centres (RCs) summing up to over 730 CPU cores and 60 Terabytes of storage space, thus proving that the deployment of an European-Latin American e-Infrastructure was not only viable but is also responding to a real need of a significant part of the Scientific Community.

The EELA-2 vision is two-fold:

• Consolidate and expand the current EELA e-Infrastructure built on the GÉANT2/European and RedCLARA/LA National Research & Education Networks (NREN), to become an e-Infrastructure Facility, providing a full set of enhanced services to all types of Applications from multiple Scientific Areas of European and Latin American Scientific Communities;
• Ascertain the conditions of the durability of the e-Infrastructure, beyond the Project duration.