D4Science-II started on October 1st 2009 as one of the main European e-Infrastructure projects, involving 10 participants such as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Co-funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, the D4Science-II project will hold its kick-off meeting 13-16 October 2009 in Pisa, Italy.
Read more: D4Science-II - Towards an e-Infrastructure Ecosystem for Science
This reward results from the great technical work achieved in the project, and also the consortium enormous success in standardisation activities.
ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary in Paris. The event, co-hosted by INRIA, included presentations by renowned personalities from research and industry, and representatives from the ERCIM community.
ERCIM aims to foster collaborative work within the European ICT research community and to increase co-operation with European industry. Leading research institutes from twenty European countries are members of ERCIM, which therefore represents a force of more than 12,000 scientists and engineers.
GridCOMP, Grid Programming with COMPonents, to stand out as an Advanced Component platform for an Effective Invisible Grid.
GridCOMP is a Specific Targeted Research Project on Grid programming with components, partially funded by the European Commission in the sixth Framework Programme (FP6) from June 2006 to February 2009.
According to Denis Caromel, INRIA, Scientific Coordinator, “The main goal of the project was the design and implementation of a component based framework suitable to support the development of efficient grid applications. The produced framework implements the "invisible grid" concept: abstract away grid related implementation details (hardware, OS, authorization and security, load, failure, etc.) that usually require high programming efforts to be dealt with. Therefore, GridCOMP makes it possible to seamlessly compose applications and services deployed on small to large scale infrastructures.“
Read more: GridCOMP project results: Composing distributed code and services for Scale and Speed
Portugal is back in ERCIM after more than ten years' absence. While INESC (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores) was in fact a member of ERCIM back in 1991, internal problems, both financial and organizational, meant it was necessary for it to leave in 1998. It is only now with PEG – the Portuguese ERCIM Grouping – that Portugal again has a representative institution. PEG was a recent initiative to allow the country to have a wide institutional representation, thus providing a wider group of researchers and research groups with access to ERCIM.