European DataGrid project: status and plans

The European DataGrid (EDG) project has reached, after 1.5 years, the middle of its lifetime. In this article we give an overview of the status, components, procedures and plans of the EDG project as of June 2002. The objective of the EDG project is to assist the next generation of scientific exploration, computation and analysis of large-scale data sets--from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, across widely distributed scientific communities. The primary goal of the first phase of the EDG project was to assemble a distributed testbed to demonstrate that the EDG middleware components could be integrated into a production-quality computational Grid, as well as to gain experience with such a system. The very first version of the EDG testbed was deployed toward the end of 2001. At the first official European Union review of the project on March 1, 2002, it has been found that the project is on the right track to achieve its goals. Since then the EDG middleware, testbed components and procedures have been continuously refined according to the requirements of our user communities and our experience