The presentation aims to give an overall picture of the developments and projects connected to the European and national Grid infrastructure and the future plans. The main emphasis is on the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) project launched by CERN, which is closely connected to recent nuclear researches.

The EGEE project is the largest multi-disciplinary grid infrastructure in the world, which brings together more than 140 institutions to produce a reliable and scalable computing resource available to the European and global research community. At present, it consists of approximately 300 sites in 50 countries and gives its 16,000 users access to 114,000 CPU cores around-the-clock. At the moment the third phase of the project is on the progress. The objectives of this phase are to continue the previously started researches, expanding, optimizing the use of Europe?s largest production grid by continuous operation of the infrastructure, developing constantly the gLite middleware to dependably support more user communities. In all phases of the EGEE several Hungarian institutes took part and still taking part.

The past phases of the EGEE project have established the basis of creating the European Grid infratructure, which maintenance and operation creates newer and newer challenges and surely needs newer financial resources. The goal of the European Grid Indicative Design Study project (EGI_DS) is to evaluate use cases for the applicability of a coordinated effort, to identify processes and mechanisms for establishing EGI, to define the structure of a corresponding body, and ultimately to initiate the construction of the EGI organization (EGI.org). The presentation intends to present these concepts as well.