Logo EGEE
Home > News > EGEE at the ITU's Regional Radiocommunication Conference

EGEE at the ITU's Regional Radiocommunication Conference

EGEE helps achieve international digital broadcasting agreement

Geneva, 11 July 2006 - over the last few months the EGEE Project (Enabling Grids for EsciencE) has successfully supported a series of large-scale data processing activities carried out by ITU (International Telecommunications Union) as part of the association's Regional Radiocommunication Conference (RRC-06, 15 May-16 June 2006).

The purpose of the data processing, which was carried out at regular intervals during the 5-week conference, was to rapidly map the consequences of different scenarios that are being negotiated between participating countries in order to establish a new frequency plan for the introduction of digital broadcasting in Europe, Africa, the Arab States and the former USSR states.

Speaking on behalf of EGEE and CERN at the ITU conference, Dr. Wolfgang von Rüden, Head of CERN’s IT Department, described how Grids could provide dependable computing services on demand also for time-limited computational challenges like the one facing the ITU. Using a relatively small subset comprising a few hundred of the EGEE Grid infrastructure’s estimated 20 000 PCs, the time needed for the most demanding analysis step was reduced to well below one hour on the Grid from the usual four hours using the local cluster. The successful outcome provides another powerful example of the benefits of Grid technology.

Download the press release in English, in Spanish and in Russian.