Two Years of CoreGRID, from Integration towards Sustainability Helsinki, November 20, 2006 – Today, at the IST Event 2006 in Helsinki, Finland, CoreGRID is presenting the primary results of its first two-year activity of integrating and coordinating Grid research efforts in close cooperation with industry, aligning both research and industry towards the construction of a sustainable European Research Area. CoreGRID is a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development through a grant of €8.2 million assigned for a duration of four years. Operated as the European Grid Research Laboratory, the CoreGRID Network is conducting research in the field of Grid and peer-to-peer technologies by integrating expertise and promoting scientific and technological excellence within and beyond the Grid community. The Network gathers more than 300 well-established researchers and PhD students into an ambitious joint programme of activities which are structured around six strategic and complementary research areas, organized as Institutes: Knowledge and Data Management; Programming Model; System Architecture; Grid Information, Resource and Workflow Monitoring Services; Resource Management and Scheduling; and Grid Systems, Tools and Environments. CoreGRID has now been running for two years and is helping Europe take Grids out of the research labs into industry. Following the selection of the CoreGRID project for a research stand at the most important European event in the field of Information Society Technologies, the Network is highlighting its prototyping work at the IST Event 2006 by presenting two of its best demonstration cases. The first one will show how Grid technologies allow to faster simulate and predict pollutant transport in groundwater with a controlled quality of service (QoS) thanks to additional distributed computing resource. The second demonstration is called Intensive Care Grid (ICGrid), a distributed platform enabling the seamless integration, correlation and retrieval of clinically interesting episodes across intensive care units. According to Monica Marinucci, Oracle in R&D Programme Director and Oracle representative on the CoreGRID Industrial Advisory Board, “Rated for their scientific excellence and industrial relevance, these two CoreGRID demonstration cases highlight the relevance of coordinating Grid research efforts at European level for a greater use of Grid technologies in different industrial sectors which is key for mobilizing Europe's scientific and technological capital to deliver more competitiveness and better products.” The first two years of CoreGRID aimed at reinforcing integration and industrial links, spreading excellence, disseminating research results, and advancing the state of the art in a number of Grid research areas crucial to the development of the Next Generation Grid. In the years to come, the Network is committed to advancing further towards sustainable integration by involving industrial stakeholders in defining the strategies to achieve economic impact, becoming the European-wide research laboratory in distributed Grid, peer-to-peer and service-oriented technologies. These endeavours will continue to increase the impact of the remarkable academic results on the competitiveness of European industry. “The expected end result is a sustainable European research community, highly visible in the international research arena, in the fields of Grid and peer-to-peer technologies. That said, CoreGRID will continue operating after the official ending date of its EU funding. It is anticipated that after four years of existence, CoreGRID will make determinant contributions to the Next Generation Grid vision,” said Dr Thierry Priol of INRIA, in charge of CoreGRID’s scientific co-ordination. The ideas driving the CoreGRID project are definitely excellence, integration, dissemination and sustainability. And CoreGRID has clearly set out the path towards making sure today’s research will address tomorrow’s market needs. About CoreGRID Project start date: September 1, 2004 Duration: 48 months EU funding: €8,200,000 Type of project: Network of Excellence Project reference: 004265 Programme type: Sixth Framework Programme Programme acronym: FP6-IST Project co-ordinator: Bruno Le Dantec, ERCIM Further information on CoreGRID can be found at www.coregrid.net CoreGRID Annual Report 2005 available for download on www.coregrid.net Countries Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom