The Sicilian e-Infrastructure showcased at the Third EGEE User Forum

The COMETA Consortium, a private not-for-profit Organization established in Catania, Sicily (Italy) in 2005, is one such project, aiming to connect the Sicilian Grid-based e-Infrastructure to those already existing in Italy, in Europe and in the rest of the world. Using the Grid, COMETA wants to create a Virtual Laboratory in Sicily, for both scientific and industrial applications.

The COMETA e-Infrastructure, financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research through the PI2S2 project, is distributed over 7 sites in Sicily with more than 2000 CPU cores and 250 TB of disk storage. Over 40 applications in Astrophysics, Bioinformatics, Biomedicine, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics are already running on the Sicilian e-Infrastructure, which can perform the equivalent of more than ten years work in just one month.

“The COMETA Consortium and the PI2S2 project are completely changing the perspectives of scientific computation in Sicily” says Prof. Roberto Barbera, Chief Technical Officer of COMETA and Coordinator of PI2S2, “opening the doors of a large e-Infrastructure also to the needs of numerous SMEs located in the region. All this would have been impossible without the experience gained by some of the members of the Consortium through the participation in a large international Grid project such as EGEE”.

“We warmly thank both the EGEE project and the Programme Committee of the Third User Forum for this very good opportunity”, continues Prof. Barbera, “that confirms the important role of such events to ‘give room’ to the e-Science done also on a small geographical scale”.

“Established regional infrastructures, like the COMETA e-Infrastructure, is one of the keys to a successful, integrated European Grid. One of the important aspects of EGEE's work is to support the promotion and adoption of such infrastructures, and learn from their experiences to help other similar initiatives, and bring the European Grid Infrastructure one step closer.” says Florida Estrella, EGEE’s Collaborating Projects Liaison Officer.