WHAT PRIORITIES WILL BE GIVEN TO NEXT GENERATION GRID?

• Position: Brief Article

The European Commission's Information Society DG is setting up a group of visionary experts to identify research priorities for future Grid technologies within the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The initiative was one of several outcomes from a two day workshop on 'Grid computing for complex problem solving' hosted by the Commission on January 29 and 30. The expert group will hold its kick off meeting in early April, and will meet again prior to the second FP6 calls for proposals, which will cover Grids projects.

During the workshop Fabio Colasanti, Director General of DG Information Society, underlined the growing importance of Grid computing and its potential for enhancing Europe's competitiveness. Interest in the ability of Grid networks to perform complex and data intensive tasks over distributed resources is growing worldwide, but many research and technological challenges must first be overcome if Grids are to be widely embraced outside academic circles and more within industry.

Identifying those challenges was the task of the 200 researchers from European...