The evolving grid deployment and operations model within EGEE, LCG and GridPP

Over the last year the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project has seen its deployed resources grow to over 15,000 CPUs in more than 35 countries. The UK and Ireland Regional Operations Centre (UKI ROC) has played a significant role in the development and refinement of the presently used deployment and operations model. This paper reviews the background to the EGEE project and describes these models. As a large part of the EGEE resources are provided by sites of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) computing grid (LCG), and within the UK by the Grid for Particle Physics project (GridPP), this paper describes the deployment activities surrounding these organisations and provides some insight into their future plans and challenges.