We interviewed Mirco Mazzucato, former director of the IGI - Italian Grid Infrastructure and senior researcher at INFN, one of the founding members of EGI. We asked Mirco about the evolution of DataGrid into EGEE and the following projects and the potential to innovation offered by the grid infrastructure.

Back in 1999, I was chairing the computing committee for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment. We knew the amount of data analysis after the previous experiment, LEP, would be massive. The challenge? All those different computing centres from LEP used physical tapes and were not connected by the Internet!

Fast-forward to the early 2000s: the Internet finally offered the bandwidth to handle huge data transfers. We then started thinking about what type of technology could grant researchers access to the wealth of data. But there was another issue: each of the dozens and later hundreds of computing centres used its own software and was rather conservative when it came to sharing the underlying technology. The landscape was such that the technology might have allowed connecting computing centres, but there was no standard way to do that with systems using different software. At the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Italy, we were ahead of the curve. At the time, maybe among the first users in Europe, we started using Condor, a technology that allows distributed resource sharing and monitoring of local compute resources.

Around the same time, I came across a book called The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman that talked about a new way to connect computers. It felt like a lightbulb moment! We could add a grid computing element in front of each compute resource with its own controls, and this way, we could solve our problem, allowing the computers to work together.

With some convincing, we contacted the book's authors and started testing their software, Globus, at INFN. It worked! We connected our local centres and even convinced CERN, the European infrastructure building the LHC, to join us in putting the grid as the technology to test and develop in a future European project.

This led to the DataGrid project. We brought together CERN, other scientists, and the Globus team. DataGrid was a prototype, but it showed the potential of the Grid for all sorts of science, not just particle physics. It also highlighted the need for a secure system, so we built a network of trusted certificates across different countries.

DataGrid was a stepping stone. We needed something bigger and more robust for the massive data demands of the LHC. That's how EGEE, or Enabling Grids for E-science, was born. EGEE focused on building a solid infrastructure that could handle millions of jobs and terabytes of data. It wasn't just about the hardware; we also needed software that could work across different scientific disciplines.

EGEE eventually evolved into the European Grid Initiative (EGI). Today’s EGI is the world’s leading federated computing infrastructure, with representatives from all over Europe and collaborators globally working together. 

While I'm proud of EGI, there's one missed opportunity that stings a bit. Around the time EGEE was wrapping up, there was a buzz about something called "cloud computing." We had a chance to build a European cloud platform that researchers could use easily, but at that time, we couldn't quite get everyone on board. The US ended up developing OpenStack, while we were still figuring things out.

Looking back, the Grid is still my biggest achievement. It wasn't just about the technology; it was about bringing people together from different countries and scientific fields to collaborate on something groundbreaking.