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EGEE, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, entered its second phase in April. This very successful project has been providing an international Grid computing infrastructure since 2004 and will continue to ddo so for at least another two years, commencing on April 1st. As for the first phase, it is being coordinated by CERN and co-funded by the European Commission and national funding agencies through partner institutes.

"We are all very happy about the smooth start of the second phase of EGEE," said Project Director Bob Jones. "The project builds on the successes of its first two years and now we are focussing on stability of the deployed infrastructure. Growing beyond our pilot application areas of HEP and biomedicine, we now see increasing use by researchers from other fields. Recently we've added finance and fusion to the list of disciplines we support, and we are always looking for new users."

Conceived as a four year project, EGEE started in April 2004 concentrating on two scientific fields, high energy physics and life sciences. In this initial phase it grew to cover numerous disciplines, from
geology to computational chemistry, and now has 30,000 CPUS at over 200 sites around the world.

The EGEE project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 90 institutions in 39 countries world-wide to provide a seamless Grid infrastructure for e-Science that is available for scientists 24 hours-a-day.