E-Infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America (EELA)

EELA (E-Infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America) was a project that aimed to deploy and potentially develop grid applications in e-learning, biomedical science and particle physics, while also creating a human network in grids, e-science and e-infrastructures.

EELA began on 1 January 2006 and ran for two years. 21 institutions from Europe and Latin America participated in the project, which was funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme.

The project's main focus was to create a collaboration network that organised training in grid technologies, and in parallel deployed a pilot grid infrastructure for e-science applications. The pilot infrastructure included grid cluster deployment wherever possible, and the development and enforcement of operational and organisational schemes and policies.

EELA was an integral part in the support of volcano sonification studies, conducted first at Mount Etna, Sicily and later extended to include Ecuador’s Tungurahua volcano. Scientists in Europe and Latin America collected geophysical information on seismic movements, and transformed it into sound waves. These sound waves could then be analysed for patterns in order to identify similarities in eruption dynamics - an important technique for predicting future activity.

The sonification software was developed by Dr. Domenico Vicinanza at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) for use at Mount Etna, the tallest volcano in Europe. Dr. Vicinanza and a team of scientists, led by Prof. Roberto Barbera from the University of Catania, collaborated with colleagues in Ecuador to study the Tungurahua volcano, transferring data across GÉANT2 to the ALICE-RedCLARA network using the project's transatlantic 622-Mbps connection. The Ecuadorian National Research and Education Network (CEDIA) was responsible for the connection to the scientists based at Tungurahua itself.

The EELA-2 project, which aims at building a high capacity, production-quality, scalable Grid Facility, providing round-the-clock, worldwide access to distributed computing, storage and network resources needed by the wide spectrum of Applications from European - Latin American Scientific Collaborations, will equally be supported by the ALICE2 project.