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Find the most recent information on EU Funding activities in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by visiting our ICT in FP7 website, which covers ICT in the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) 2007 - 2013.

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Global Computing (GC) follow-up
Proactive Initiative in the 6th Framework Programme

Highlights:

What is Global Computing? (Workprogramme text)

Global computing refers to computation over "global computers", i.e., computational infrastructures available globally and able to provide uniform services with variable guarantees for communication, co-operation and mobility, resource usage, security policies and mechanisms, etc., with particular regard to exploiting their universal scale and the programmability of their services. As the scope and computational power of global infrastructures continues to grow, in order to harvest their potential benefits, and ultimately improve our quality of life, a vision needs to be realised which goes well beyond incremental and disconnected improvements of diverse (and often incompatible) implementations. The Global Computing initiative reinforces and complements previous FET activities in the area.

The key aim of this initiative is to define innovative theories, computational paradigms, linguistic mechanisms and implementation techniques for the design, realisation and deployment of global computational environments and their application and management. The expected result in the long term is to achieve real, integrated global computing in a wide range of application scenarios by providing foundational advances on suitably large classes of global computers, together with the integration of methods and concepts necessary to advance global computing as a whole.

The research should focus on common characteristics representing a family of potential or actual global computers described by appropriate abstractions. The nature of these abstractions is not prescribed in the call, although they can generally be referred to as "overlay computers", i.e., abstractions that can be implemented on top of global computers to yield enhanced classes of global computers that are programmable and computationally complete in their application domain.

Research proposals should tackle all the four issues of security, resource usage and management, scalability, and distribution transparency, all intended in a broad sense and in the context of global computing, as they are pivotal to realising the aim of the initiative.

The proposed research should aim to devise theories and techniques concerned with these four issues that are either applicable to global computing in general, and can therefore form the conceptual backbone for the whole initiative, or that are applicable to specific classes of global/overlay computers, where this is fully justified. In doing so, the research is encouraged to find connections between overlay computers, address common characteristics, and provide common solutions.

Proposals should present a research approach aiming at substantial integration between theory, systems building and experimentation, following a foundational approach typical of Computer Science research.

This initiative was called as part of IST Call 3, which is now closed.
A FET Infoday was organised in Brussels on 3-4 June 2004.
Types of projects called: Integrated projects (IP) and Networks of excellence
Projects resulting from the call are expected to start in autumn 2005.

GRID vs GLOBAL COMPUTING (GC): a possible definition

"Grid" research concerns essentially a range of middleware technologies intended to support resource sharing between groups of computers. Originally, this research was meant to increase computing power by sharing tasks between different computers.
Grid technologies can be characterized as peer-to-peer, emerging de facto standards, which have evolved in an ad hoc manner and are now reasonably mature.
Instead, "Global Computing" research provides the foundations for the development of large-scale general purpose computer systems that have dependably predictable behaviour, for the needs of a distributed world. Might be designed to support Resource Sharing (grids), Internet commerce (web services), or Ambient Intelligence (e.g. via UMTS). GC techniques will be applicable to all these different domains.
In essence, GC research is not just middleware, but goes up to software engineering methods. Furthermore, GC addresses a range of issues that are not explicitly addresses by the Grid, such as mobility, ubiquity, dynamicity, interactivity.

Projects

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Download presentations given at the DISSTRUST Workshop (April 2006)

Timetable Global Computingfollow-up Proactive Initiative


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