The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 240 institutions in 45 countries world-wide to provide a seamless Grid infrastructure for e-Science that is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day. Conceived from the start as a four-year project, the second two-year phase started on 1 April 2006, and is funded by the European Commission.

Expanding from originally two scientific fields, high energy physics and life sciences, EGEE now integrates applications from many other scientific fields, ranging from geology to computational chemistry. Generally, the EGEE Grid infrastructure is ideal for any scientific research especially where the time and resources needed for running the applications are considered impractical when using traditional IT infrastructures.

The EGEE Grid consists of 41,000 CPU available to users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in addition to about 5 PB disk (5 million Gigabytes) + tape MSS of storage, and maintains 100,000 concurrent jobs. Having such resources available changes the way scientific research takes place. The end use depends on the users' needs: large storage capacity, the bandwidth that the infrastructure provides, or the sheer computing power available.

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE Project uses a series of acronyms and keywords. To check their meanings, please refer to the glossary.