Happy Birthday, EGI!
Magdalena Brus
Communications Team Lead
Updated 08/02/2022
Today, we celebrate our 12th anniversary as an organisation that empowers researchers with seamless access to computing services, resources and expertise to collaborate and conduct world-class research and innovation.
The EGI Foundation was established in Amsterdam in 2010 as the coordinating body of the EGI Federation to build an integrated pan-European infrastructure to primarily support European research communities.
EGI was a significant infrastructure right from the beginning. The total number of CPU hours delivered by the EGI HTC federated infrastructure in 2010 reached 358 million CPU hours. However, the number of hours provided in 2021 exceeded 6 billion! Indeed, the total 38 billion hours delivered during the 12 years of our operations is impressive. If the number of HTC cores counted 200.000 in 2010, in 2022, we manage over 1.2 million cores.
The EGI Federated Cloud integrates community, private and/or public clouds into a scalable computing platform for data and/or compute-driven applications and services. The original architecture was put into production in May 2014. Since then, our cloud providers and operation centres have delivered over 123 million CPU hours utilising more than 2.7 million virtual machines.
The EGI ecosystem, counting over 208 data centres, serves over 77.000 researchers in their intensive data analysis. It is the quality and diversity of our services, know-how, training opportunities and other activities that attract more users every year. The most significant scientific communities in EGI in 2022 are Medical and Health Sciences, High Energy Physics, and Earth and Environmental Sciences. The most tangible indicator of our contribution to excellent science is the number of publications and other research products enabled by our infrastructure. We are proud to say the EGI supported over 29.000 publications throughout the last 12 years.
But it is not only our core activities that deserve attention. EGI, as an organisation with a strong commitment to collaboration, has engaged with an impressive number of new scientific and coordination projects and communities. During the last 12 years, we have either coordinated or contributed to 55 international projects.
All this was possible thanks to the EGI Federation with 27 EGI Council participants, the entire EGI community behind, our partners and project collaborators. We want to thank you all. We hope we will soon meet in Prague during the EGI2022 conference. Indeed, collaboration is going to be central to this event.
A very happy birthday to the EGI community and we look forward to more exciting years ahead!