CHEP04

In September 2003 the first LCG-1 service was put into production at most of the large Tier 1 sites and was quickly expanded up to 30 Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites by the end of the year. Several software upgrades were made and the LCG-2 service was put into production in time for the experiment data challenges that began in February 2004 and continued for several months. In particular LCG-2 introduced transparent access to mass storage and managed disk-only storage elements, and a first release of the Grid File Access library. Much valuable experience was gained during the data challenges in all aspects from the functionality and use of the middleware, to the deployment, maintenance, and operation of the services at many sites. Based on this experience a program of work to address the functional and operational issues is being implemented. The goal is to focus on essential areas such as data management and to build by the end of 2004 a basic grid system capable of handling the basic needs of LHC computing, providing direction for future middleware and service development. The LCG-2 infrastructure also forms the production service of EGEE. This involves supporting new application communities, bringing in new sites not associated with HEP and evolving a full scale 24x7 user and operational support structure. We will describe the EGEE infrastructure, how it supports and interacts with LCG, and how we expect the infrastructure to evolve over the next year of the EGEE project