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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
Emergency Response Grid
In times of crisis — be it a natural disaster, terrorist attack or infrastructure failure — mobile workers need to work together in time-critical and dangerous situations. Real-time access to information and knowledge, powered by Grids, will help save lives.
Crises are complex situations, with large numbers and varieties of mobile workers — medical and rescue teams, police, fire fighters and other security personnel — appearing on the spot at short notice. These different teams come from different organisations, and generally have incomplete or even contradictory knowledge of the crisis situation. Finally, many of the sophisticated tools they bring with them — from infra-red cameras to find victims in the rubble to decision-support systems for planning evacuations — will probably not interconnect with anyone else’s.
Grid technologies could fill this collaboration gap, helping these workers to work more effectively both as individuals and as members of highly complex teams. For example, while current mobile equipment has limited computational power, a Grid set up to help handle the disaster could allow workers to use their devices to tap high performance computing power. This opens possibilities such as real-time audiovisual analysis: extracting useful information from images, videos and sound that can be used to rescue victims and instruct personnel.
Moreover, all mobile teams will be supplying information to and accessing information from the Grid, allowing diverse emergency resources and teams to share knowledge and improve collaboration and planning.
To fulfil this potential, however, a range of new research challenges must be addressed.