The DataGrid Project

An overview of the objectives and status of the DataGrid Project is presented, together with a brief introduction to the Grid metaphor and some references to the Grid activities and initiatives related to DataGrid. High energy physics experiments have always requested state of the art computing facilities to efficiently perform several computing activities related with the handling of large amounts of data and fairly large computing resources. Some of the ideas born inside the community to enhance the user friendliness of all the steps in the computing chain have been, sometimes, successfully applied also in other contexts: one bright example is the World Wide Web. The LHC computing challenge has triggered inside the high energy physics community, the start of the DataGrid Project. The objective of the project is to enable next generation scientific exploration requiring intensive computation and analysis of shared large-scale databases. (12 refs).