WLCG in a global context

The computing centres providing resources for WLCG are embedded in different operational Grid organisations across the world, in particular EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-SciencE) and OSG (the Open Science Grid), but also several national and regional Grid structures.

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project is funded by the European Commission and aims to integrate current national, regional and thematic Grid efforts, in order to create a seamless Grid infrastructure available to scientists 24 hours-a-day, for the support of scientific research. WLCG and EGEE are tightly coupled and provide complementary functions.

OSG (Open Science Grid) is a U.S. distributed computing infrastructure for large-scale scientific research, built and operated by a consortium of universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations and software developers. The OSG integrates computing and storage resources from more than 50 sites in the United States, Asia and South America. Researchers from many fields of science use the OSG infrastructure, including the U.S. participants in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC. The OSG is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy's Office of Science.

gLite is the next generation middleware for grid computing. Born from the collaborative efforts of more than 80 people in 12 different academic and industrial research centers as part of the EGEE Project, gLite provides a framework for building grid applications tapping into the power of distributed computing and storage resources across the Internet.

The Globus Alliance involves several universities and research laboratories conducting research and development to create fundamental Grid technologies and produce open-source software. The WLCG project is actively involved in the support of Globus and uses the Globus-based Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT) as part of the project middleware.

The WLCG project is also following developments in industry, in particular through CERN openlab, where leading IT companies are testing and validating cutting-edge Grid technologies using the WLCG environment.

For more information on the national and regional grids involved with WLCG across the world, see the GridGuide.