Grid computing 'vital to Europe's future'

The European Commission (EC) has announced that grid computing will be a cornerstone in attempts to improve the coordination of research and development activities across Europe and improve competition with the US and Japan.

In a speech on Tuesday, Viviane Reding, the EC's Commissioner for Information Society, said grids will be a "crucial enabling technology in achieving the productivity and growth challenges".

Grid technology is key to the new European Information Society 2010 initiative which aims to promote higher economic growth and social inclusion across the union, said Reding. The aim of the initiative is to make the European Union (EU) "the most competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world by the year 2010", she said.

"Thanks to the developments in grid technologies driven by a new generation of European computer scientists, we stand on the edge of what could be another major technological revolution. By making colossal processing power on-demand widely available, Grid technologies raises for society and industry the prospect of solving problems never previously imagined and the possibility of offering a whole new generation of services," added Reding.

The EC has requested that the research budget for the Seventh EU Framework Programme be doubled to €70bn (£47bn) over seven years compared with funding for the previous such programme. Grids "as drivers for new software infrastructures and service oriented architectures" will be one of the central research and development focuses.

Reding is also hoping to promote improved co-ordination between European and national research programmes to boost the impact of the spending increase. "The fragmentation of research activities in Europe represents a major handicap, in particular when compared to the US and Japan," she added. "The creation of a European Research Area can considerably increase the return we get on our research expenditure and is a cornerstone of my i2010 initiative."

The European Research Area will create an "internal market" for research activities and is expected to lead to "the reciprocal opening of national research programmes to researchers from other member countries and the launch of fully trans-national programmes jointly funded by more than one country" to create sustainable mechanisms for cross-border collaboration.

But Reding claimed that the available public money to fund research was not enough and called on the private sector to make commitments to long-term and strategic research into IT use in Europe. To improve the commercial exploitation of research results, the level of private-public partnerships and aligning business agendas with research agendas, must be addressed, she said.

Meanwhile, the UK National Grid Service (NGS), the UK's e-Science Grid, gained two new members in the shape of Cardiff and Bristol universities.

Cardiff's Welsh e-Science Centre hooked up its Silicon Graphics Irix cluster to the network, while the Centre for e-Research Bristol linked up its Beowulf cluster of several hundred PCs.

NGS started operating in September last year with four nodes funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Council for the Central Laboratory for the Research Councils. It has since added six institutions to its Grid, including Oxford, Leeds and Manchester universities.