BiG Grid will provide a Grid infrastructure for e-science in general and for life sciences and particle physics in particular. BiG Grid is a 28,8 million euro project that will run for five years. The main goal of the project is to provide the infrastructure for the science Grid in the Netherlands, including technical and usersupport. BiG Grid's ambition is also to attract new user communities to the Grid.

The cluster at Nikhef will allow BiG Grid to act as one of the Tier 1 centres for the CERN led Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project. When the LHC is active, about 800 million events are created every second. In total the LHC will generate 16 Petabyte (16000 Terabyte) of raw data each year. This has to be accessed and analysed by scientists all around Europe. Hence there are about 10 large centres created in Europe that will store data, have large computational power and fast network access. These are the so-called LHC Tier 1 centres.

"I am very happy that BiG Grid, after a careful tendering process, has now finally been able to build up quickly the resources for the Dutch Tier-1. With the first colliding beams of the LHC imminent, it is for Nikhef very important to be prepared to handle the tremendous amount of data coming out of the experiments. Our community has been working towards this moment for more than a decade", stated Prof. dr. Frank Linde, director Nikhef, co-director BiG Grid.

"In the RfP phase of the tendering process, the proposal by ClusterVision was highly ranked by BiG Grid, on the basis of which they have been selected as one of the three preferred suppliers for computing equipment. We are pleased to see, that in this first round of minitenders this promising score has materialised in two very competitive and winning offers from Clustervision. We are also very happy with the timely and professional delivery and installation", stated Drs. Arjen van Rijn, chairman BiG Grid Technical Committee.

"We are delighted that Big Grid has selected ClusterVision to deliver the first two large server farms to Nikhef and SARA, allowing us to make a modest contribution to this major national science project", stated Dr. ir. Matthijs van Leeuwen, Sales Director ClusterVision.