The Lisbon Summit in Spring 2000 engaged a new challenge for the European Union: to become the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by the year 2010. One emerging Information Society Technology that presents an opportunity for the EU to achieve this ambitious goal is the “Grid”.
Within the Sixth Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration Activities 2002-2006 (FP6), the Council and the European Parliament identified the “Grid”concept as a key area for research within Information Society Technologies (IST) activities. Furthermore, in March 2003 the EU’s Competitiveness Council identified Grids and Infrastructures as frontier and leading-edge technologies to be given high priority and pursued by the European Commission and Member States.
Grids enable access to and the sharing of geographically distributed heterogeneous resources such as computation, data and information sources, sensors and instruments, for solving large-scale or complex problems in science, engineering and commerce. Through virtualisation of these resources, Grids will become easier to program and to use. They will thus offer European industry the potential to deliver an entire new generation of tools, services and collaborative business opportunities. In simple terms, Grid-based technologies now hold the potential to revolutionise the Internet of tomorrow as the WWW did for the Internet of today.
The present capabilities of Grids are largely being demonstrated in a variety of ‘big’eScience applications, but the ultimate commercial benefits will come from their use in industry sectors such as biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, automotive and aerospace, finance and media. Research and the promotion of early adoption by industry are crucial to move Grids from their pioneering stage in science to widespread use, both by industry and business.
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