EU Commissioner visits CERN


European Commissioner Viviane Reding in front of one of the computers showing how the Grid works and, from left to right, Robert Aymar, CERN's Director-General, Wolfgang von Rüden, Head of the Information Technology Department, and Bob Jones, the newly appointed director of the EGEE project since 1st November.

Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, visited CERN on 28 October. Accompanied throughout by CERN's Director-General, Robert Aymar, and the Head of the Information Technology Department, Wolfgang von Rüden, the Commissioner visited the ATLAS cavern before going on to the Information Technology Department, where she was given a complete overview of CERN's activities in the strategic field of Grid computing.

Viviane Reding's visit coincided with the end of the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) conference, which took place in Pisa in Italy. Co-ordinated by CERN and funded by the European Commission, the EGEE project aims to set up a worldwide grid infrastructure for science. Eighteen months after it was launched, the project now encompasses 150 sites throughout the world and has passed the milestone of two million computing jobs, the equivalent of more than a thousand years of processing using a single PC.