The EGI grid offers an unprecedented opportunity to observe, and start understanding the new computing practices of e-science. With more than 200.000 CPUs and 100PB of storage distributed worldwide, the management of 26 million jobs per month and the perspective of a sustainable development, the EGI grid is one of the more exciting artificial complex systems to observe.

The Grid Observatory collects, publishes, and analyzes, data on the behaviour of the EGI grid. The ultimate goal of The Grid Observatory is to integrate data collection, data analysis, and the development of models and of an ontology for the domain knowledge.

The Grid Observatory is part of the EGI-Inspire project. Because grid data and models are equally relevant for computer science, middleware development and system administration, the Grid Observatory is an open project.

• The traces are publicly available for scientific research
• Currently, the Grid Observatory provides only traces of the EGI grid; it can be extended in the future to traces of other grids