Innovative environment and commercial exploitation needed to ensure EU competitiveness in Grid computing, concludes conference

Brussels, 02 Feb 2004

The need to address the industrialisation of grid software was emphasised at a recent workshop, organised by the European Commission, which sought to assess how EU actions and research can support the development of middleware for distributed applications with low installation and maintenance costs.

Several speakers highlighted the potential benefits of open source software development of grids, and participants called for the continuing co-existence of different licensing schemes in order to maximise innovation. The 'high speed European research infrastructure' was also highlighted as providing a possibility to test and deploy Grid software.

Grid systems - the sharing of information and processing resources between networked computers - are considered to be one of the potential areas for major growth in the future software and service industry. This was recognised by the European Commission when it was made one of the objectives of the information society technologies (IST) thematic priority of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). High quality middleware is a crucial component in grids, constituting the layer that links together sharable resources and applications on different computers.

For further information, please consult the following web address:
http://www.cordis.lu/ist/grids

CORDIS RTD-NEWS / © European Communities