Geneva, 15 September 2006. This week at GridWorld, a major conference for enterprise Grids held in Washington, D.C., CERN¹ was honoured with two awards for “Most Innovative Grid Implementation in Public Sector Research” and “Overall Top Research Grid”. The awards were presented by the publishers of GRIDtoday, a leading source of news on Grid technology for the business world. These awards signal the growing interest of the business community in the Grid technology that CERN and its partners have been developing. The immediate goal of this development is to cope with the storage and analysis of millions of gigabytes of particle physics data that will flow annually from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), due to be launched next year. However, just like the World Wide Web, invented at CERN in the early 90s for research purposes, scientific Grid projects led by CERN are expected to create new opportunities for commerce and industry.

CERN’s flagship Grid initiative, the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project, already runs a Grid service for particle physicists spanning over 200 sites at universities and research institutes worldwide. CERN also leads the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project, a multi-science Grid infrastructure with 91 partners in Europe, Russia, the U.S. and Asia. EGEE supports a wide range of scientific applications, from biomedicine to astrophysics, and is being tested for business applications as diverse as financial modelling and petroleum prospecting. CERN also has established the CERN openlab partnership with leading IT companies - including HP, Intel and Oracle - to investigate future trends in hardware and software that will influence the development of Grid technology.

The awards are part of the GRIDToday Annual Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. CERN was selected based on a poll of several thousand readers who represent IT companies and industrial sectors that use Grid technology intensively. “We welcome this opportunity to articulate the views and opinions of our readers, who recognize the accomplishments that are being made in advancing the development and adoption of Grid technology,” said Tom Tabor, publisher of GRIDtoday. “These industry recognition awards send a strong message to the recipients that the many firms working in this important computing segment consider their efforts meritorious.”

Receiving the awards on behalf of CERN, Erwin Laure, Technical Director of the EGEE project, remarked that “Grid computing is very much a collaborative effort, with hundreds of institutes and thousands of individuals involved. It is an honour to accept these awards and the recognition from the business community that they imply, for CERN and all our partners who are pushing the frontiers of scientific computing.”

Further information:

• LCG project
• EGEE project
• CERN openlab
• GridCafe (public site about Grids)

Press contact person:

François Grey
IT Communications Team
CERN IT Department
Email: Francois.Grey@cern.ch
Tel.: +41 22 767 1483

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.