Information & Communication Technologies

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The Research Infrastructures part of the FP7 Capacities Programme supports an innovative way of conducting scientific research (referred to as e-Science) by the creation of a new environment for academic and industrial research in which virtual communities share, federate and exploit the collective power of European scientific facilities.

The term e-Infrastructure refers to this new research environment in which all researchers - whether working in the context of their home institutions or in national or multinational scientific initiatives - have shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), regardless of their type and location in the world.

Within the broader context of i2010 and with the ambition of maintaining a world-wide leadership the deployed ICT-based infrastructures will constitute an essential building block for the European Research Area (ERA). They will support the emergence of an innovation space combining the specific interests of the scientific communities and the economies of scale and providing cross disciplinary solutions.

The e-Infrastructure activity will:

• Extend and reinforce the high capacity communication infrastructure GÉANT
• Strengthen multidisciplinary grid and supercomputing infrastructures
• Expand scientific data infrastructure
• Encourage the adoption of e-Infrastructure by an increasing number of user communities
• Stimulate new organisational models
• Support the construction of new computation and data treatment facilities (petaflop supercomputing)

Exploit the power of e-Infrastructure as a vector of international cooperation