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'Building Grids for Europe' brochure
Table of contents
- Welcome
- What is a Grid?
- Grids: Crucial technologies and applications for Europe
- Grid Expectations
- Emergency Response Grid
- The Health Grid
- Building Grids for Europe
- Towards a European Research Area for Grids
- Capitalising on EU Grid reseach
Grids: crucial technologies and applications for Europe
Grids are going to revolutionise computing as profoundly as e-mail and the Web revolutionised communications and publishing — it is perhaps not surprising that the first Grids were developed for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the particle physics laboratory that gave us the World Wide Web.
Grids are now moving out of the laboratories, following the route taken by e-mail and the Web. As with these two previous e-revolutions, Grids look set to change the way business is structured and how people work, learn and indeed live.
By providing everyone with the immense computing power and knowledge previously available only to the largest corporations and laboratories, Grids will both improve the competitiveness of existing industries and help usher in new markets and services previously thought impossible. Their impact on our quality of life will be profound, allowing us to better monitor and model everything from global climate change to the way cars behave in collisions.
Grids will enable Europe’s researchers and businesses to better share knowledge and resources across the continent. Grids will therefore help underpin a truly European research area, a space in which all of Europe’s world-class scientific and technological capital can be combined to improve European competitiveness and quality of life.
Grids are therefore a crucial enabling technology for reaching the ‘Lisbon strategy’, set in spring 2000, of transforming the European Union into the most competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world by the year 2010.
Grid technologies are a ‘Strategic Objective’ within information society technologies (ISTs) research, funded under the EU’s sixth Framework Programme (FP6) (2002–06) for research and technological development.
This brochure outlines why and how FP6 is helping Europe take Grids out of the research labs and into industry — a critical step in ensuring Europe realises the benefits of the information society.