The European Union DataGrid project (commonly known as the EU DataGrid) was designed to help handle the large amounts of data that would be generated by such “monster” computer systems as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which began operations in 2006 and others. Massive computer systems such as the LHC generate as much as 10 times the amount of data found in a petabyte (which is 1000 terabytes or 1 quadrillion bytes).
The project started January 1, 2001, and was expected to end sometime in December of 2003. What made the EU DataGrid so unique, besides its intended capacity to handle extremely large amounts of data was that the European Union—27 separate states in Europe which came together to form an economic and political union—provided funding in the amount of 9.8 million Euros (approximately $12 million-when you round up-US Dollars).
The project consisted of three “testbeds”, each of them consisting of design and testing of the initial infrastructure and the middleware (software which connects users with databases) that would be used in the DataGrid program.
The EU DataGrid’s main purpose was to allow for faster and better communication, storage, and sharing of information among the scientific and medical world as well as increasing the amount of information that would be gathered from the Earth Observation program. It was also intended for those involved in the study of particle physics to be able to work with physics programs which generated high volumes of data.
The increased ability of the DataGrid to handle data generation would come from the higher storage and sharing capabilities that would be available to users. This would allow physicists to conduct experiments several times, as space limitations would no longer be as big an issue as they were previously.