The Italian Grid is one of the largest Grid infrastructure in Europe. It is integrated with the pan-European Grid infrastructure operated in the framework of the EGEE project, and of the WLCG. It features more than 40 production sites. Various resource providers are currently part of the Italian production Grid: CNR, ENEA, INFN, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Universita' di Perugia, and SPACI.
It enables the sharing of geographically distributed resources in Italy and world-wide, such as computing, storage and data, by bridging the gap between remote resource centres and distributed communities of users. Access to resources is made possible in a standardized fashion through a customized common middleware layer based on the EGEE gLite stack, called INFN Grid Middleware Release.

Users are organized into communities called Virtual Organizations (VOs). Currently, the Italian production Grid supports 49 VOs operating in different research areas such us High Energy Physics, Biology, Computational Chemistry, Bioinformatics, Earth Science, Astrophysics, etc.
The Italian production Grid is managed by a distributed operations team, that provides a help desk for Grid site managers and users and is responsible for the monitoring and planning of the infrastructure, and for the rollout of new middleware releases to sites and core Grid services. For technical information on the Italian production Grid, please visit the operations portal.

The Italian Grid Infrastructure (IGI) is the national coordinating body for all aspects of the Italian e-Infrastructure present in EGEE III and beyond.
IGI focuses on setting up and operating a common e-Infrastructure for the Italian Sciences, and includes the main public Resource Providers and Computing Centers, in addition to various Regional Initiatives and other related projects. IGI will provide a consistent and coordinated Italian strategy as a step towards the European Grid Initiative (EGI) and as an interface to the EU Grid infrastructure projects e-IRG (e-Infrastructure Reflection Group) and ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), and to other international activities as the need arises.

For more detailed information please visit the following sessions of the IGI web site:

• Instructions for users
• Instructions for applications
• The national Operations portal