Brian Tierney has been applying his expertise in high-speed distributed data systems to the architecture of the European DataGrid.

Brian Tierney, leader of the Data Intensive Distributed Computing Group, has spent a productive sabbatical year working as a Scientific Associate in the Information Technology Division at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Not many non-Europeans are invited to work at CERN, but they wanted to take advantage of Brian's expertise in transferring large datasets across wide-area networks.

Brian has primarily been working on "Work Package 2" of the European DataGrid Project, funded by the European Union. "WP2" is responsible for the data management architecture of the project, including data access and migration, data replication, meta data management, secure and transparent data access, and query optimization. In addition, Brian has been a guest consultant on the Architecture Task Force for the DataGrid, so he's been contributing to all aspects of Grid middleware, including scheduling, security, monitoring, PC farm management, mass storage interfaces, and more.

Technologically, pretty much the same tools, such as Globus, are being used for Grids on both sides of the Atlantic, Brian says. But he does see two major differences in approach.

The biggest difference is the scale of the EU DataGrid Project, which has over 200 people working on it. Coordinating such an effort is quite a challenge, especially given the cultural clashes between disciplines (physics vs. computer science) and nationalities (for example, northern vs. southern European approaches to management and problem solving).

The other big difference is that the EU DataGrid is focused more on production, while many Grid projects in the U.S. are focused more on research. The EU really hopes to have the DataGrid in daily use at over 40 sites by the end of 2003. The ultimate goal of the EU DataGrid is to provide computing on-tap to libraries, schools, and homes, as well as scientific researchers.