European eResearch Infrastructure Developments

The European situation is much larger and more complex than is the Australian context, not just because of scale but also because any pan-european development must federate a broad set of national infrastructures and investment processes.

Nevertheless, the scale of continuing investment and the commonality of strategies being pursued are informative, as is the evolution in delivery strategies currently under way and the apparent need to deliver service layers through multiple appropriately focussed organisations.

The overall European investment in eResearch infrastructure is undertaken within the European Commissions' policy area entitled Research and Innovation, which can be accessed through CORDIS (the Community Research and Development Information Service).

Specific information on eResearch infrastructure is available under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), research infrastructure activities under the heading "ICT for e-infrastructure".

The top level goals for this investment are stated as follows:

• Extend and reinforce the high capacity communication infrastructure GÉANT
• Strengthen multidisciplinary grid and supercomputing infrastructures
• Expand scientific data infrastructure
• Encourage the adoption of e-Infrastructure by an increasing number of user communities
• Stimulate new organisational models
• Support the construction of new computation and data treatment facilities (petaflop supercomputing)

Further links and brief outlines of European eResearch infrastructure are provided below.

Compute
PRACE: Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe
	The pan-European HPC service will be a part of the European Research Area under FP7. In contrast to other Research Infrastructures that focus on a single scientific instrument, the proposed HPC Infrastructure has two unique characteristics: supercomputers can serve all scientific disciplines and tier-0 supercomputers have a three year depreciation cycle as tier-0 implies leading edge services.
	As a result, periodic renewal of the systems and a continuous upgrade is required and novel architectures and system designs will be created by the vendors for leadership systems. At any given time PRACE expects there will be between three and five different systems each of them serving a particular application spectrum best.
	This fact mandates a distributed Research Infrastructure, since no single site can host all the necessary systems because of floor space, power, and cooling demands. PRACE has the goal to create the prerequisites for such a pan-European HPC service satisfying the objectives mentioned above and to move into the implementation phase during 2010.
		The European model of a sustainable high performance ecosystem consists of a small number of supercomputer centres offering computing service at the highest performance level; national and regional centres with supercomputers able to support most of the advanced computing; with local computing centres in universities, research labs or in other organizations strengthening software development and researchers’ competence in computational science
DEISA: Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications
	DEISA is a consortium of national Supercomputing centres that aims at fostering pan-European computational science research. It aims at delivering a turnkey operational solution for a future European HPC eco system and to extend the European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing. The DEISA infrastructure is based on a tight coupling of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries, using dedicated network interconnections of GÉANT2 and the NRENs.
	DEISA was funded by the European Commission in in FP6 and again in FP7. Current work includes consolidating the existing HPC infrastructure and services and extending the service provisioning model towards the inclusion of non-localized Virtual Science Communities.
Interoperation
EGEE: Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
	EGEE has been Europe's leading grid computing project, providing a computing support infrastructure for over 10,000 researchers world-wide, from fields as diverse as high energy physics, earth and life sciences.
	EGEE is currently transitioning to a sustainable operational model, while maintaining reliable services for its users. The resources currently coordinated by EGEE will be managed through the European Grid Initiative (EGI) as of 2010. In EGI each country's grid infrastructure will be run by National Grid Initiatives. The adoption of this model will enable the next leap forward in research infrastructures to support collaborative scientific discoveries. EGI will ensure abundant, high-quality computing support for the European and global research community for many years to come.
EGI: European Grid Initiative
	EGI represents a new european effort towards a sustainable grid infrastructure driven by the needs and requirements of the research community. It is expected to enable new research infrastructures and collaborative scientific discoveries as a part of the emerging European Research Area.
	The main foundations of EGI are the National Grid Initiatives (NGI), which operate the grid infrastructures in each country. EGI will link existing NGIs and will actively support the setup and initiation of new NGIs.
	The partners in EGI provide additional motivators for the activities. Link via here
Data
Access
GÉANT: The GÉANT Network
	GÉANT is the pan-European data network dedicated to the research and education community. Together with Europe's national research networks, GÉANT connects 40 million users in over 8,000 institutions across 40 countries, it is co-funded by European National Research & Education Networks (NRENs) and the EC, and the GÉANT network and project (also known as GN3) is entering its third generation, along with associated development activities.
	GÉANT's core objective is to deliver real value and benefit to society by enabling research communities across Europe, and the world, to transform the way they collaborate on ground-breaking research. The GÉANT project advances all aspects of European research and education networking, encompassing the network itself and a portfolio of connectivity, network support and access services for NRENs, projects, institutions and end users, initiatives to address the digital divide of research and education networking across Europe and technological research to ensure GÉANT continues to be at the forefront of networking on a global scale.
	The GÉANT network and associated programme of activities is co-funded by the European Commission within the GÉANT Project (GN3) contract, which is part of the EC’s Seventh Research and Development Framework Programme (FP7) which provides funding from the EC of 93 million Euro for four years from 1 April 2009 with matching funding provided by the NREN project partners connected to the network.
	The project partners are 32 European NRENs, DANTE and TERENA; plus an additional four Associate NRENs.
DANTE: Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe
	DANTE was established in 1993 (in Cambridge, UK) as a limited liability company and a “Not for Profit” organisation, where the location was determined as a result of an international competition.
	its purpose is to plan, build and operate pan-European research networks and it has played a pivotal role in four consecutive generations of pan-European research network: EuropaNET, TEN-34, TEN-155 and now GÉANT.
	Europe's research networking backbones have typically been co-funded by the European Commission within the EU's Research & Development Framework Programmes. Within these Programmes, funding is provided to projects, which must involve partners in at least three EU member states. In the case of pan-European research networking projects, the NRENs and DANTE are the project partners, and DANTE acts as the managing partner of the project. DANTE is also involved in other EU-funded projects related to research networking, sometimes but not always as the managing partner.