Brussels, 07 Mar 2003
The European Commission's Information Society DG is setting up a group of experts to identify research priorities for future Grid technologies within the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6).
The initiative was one of several outcomes from a two day workshop on 'Grid computing for complex problem solving' hosted by the Commission on 29 and 30 January. The expert group will hold its kick off meeting in early April, and will meet again prior to the second FP6 calls for proposals, which will cover Grids projects.
During the workshop Fabio Colasanti, Director General of DG Information Society, underlined the growing importance of Grid computing and its potential for enhancing Europe's competitiveness.
Interest in the ability of Grid networks to perform complex and data intensive tasks over distributed resources is growing worldwide, but many research and technological challenges must first be overcome if Grids are to be widely embraced outside academic circles and more within industry.
Identifying those challenges was the task of the 200 researchers from European universities and companies, including small and medium sized enterprises, who attended the event.
They took part in plenary sessions and workshops which looked at issues such as the development of next generation Grid architectures, and enabling application technologies in areas such as data mining, knowledge discovery, simulation, collaborative working, virtual organisation and security.
Together with the formation of the expert group, participants also decided that two further workshops be organised to refine and map research and technological requirements in the field, and that DG Information Society will compile a comprehensive inventory of all ongoing Grid research in Europe, which will be presented before the summer.
For further information, please consult the following web address:
http://www.cordis.lu/ist/grids/