Europe Backs Open Standards to Advance Grid Adoption

Business Wire, Feb 19, 2008

PISA, Italy -- The Open Grid Forum (OGF) today announced the creation of OGF-Europe, funded by the European Commission for Mobilizing and Integrating Communities on Grid Standards & Best Practices Globally. OGF-Europe will capitalize on European Commission investments in Grid technologies by driving grid adoption and innovation across Europe in research, government, and industry.

The OGF-Europe project is aligned with OGF's global mission of pervasive grid adoption through interoperable software standards. Key deliverables include outreach seminars and workshops, adoption challenges and recommendations reports; community surveys, best practice reports and tutorials. OGF-Europe will also coordinate an "Industry Experts" council to better understand how European enterprises are dealing with issues surrounding interoperations and standardisation and to engage them in the core work of OGF.

"We thank the EU commission for their strong show of support for OGF's mission of accelerating Grid adoption through open standards and in recognizing the power of Grid in 21st century economies," said Craig Lee, OGF President. "We are dedicated to meeting the needs of the European market and synchronizing with global priorities across all our key stakeholder communities."

"OGF-Europe is critical to leveraging the significant European investments made in Grid computing into actionable and sustainable results," said Silvana Muscella, the technical coordinator of OGF-Europe and director of OGF.eeig. "OGF-Europe will be essential in bringing enterprise and eScience communities together to break down barriers and foster mainstream Grid adoption."

OGF-Europe's first Community Outreach Seminar is planned for Spring 2008 in the UK. Seminars will take place across the EU and will include innovative ways to reach out to the widest possible audience on issues that are important to Europe. In early June, the OGF23 event will bring the international Grid community to Barcelona for five days of workshops and sessions to continue the work of developing Grid best practices and open standards.

About OGF-Europe

OGF-Europe is led by Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), technically co-ordinated by OGF.eeig (The European Chapter of the OGF-European Economic Interest Group - Trust-IT Services Ltd, Innotec srl) and consists of eight other partners aiming to achieve its ambitious goals, including the Institute of Graphics and Parallel Processing at the Johannes Kepler University Linz ("GUP"), Austria; Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford UK; Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo Sociedad Anonima Unipersonal Spain; Intellect UK; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Italy; Poznan Supercomputing & Networking Centre Poland; Atos Origin, Spain & l'Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), France. www.ogf.org

The OGF-Europe project (RI-223784) to be supported by the European Commission under the Capacities Specific Programme of the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7) is under negotiation at the time this announcement was released.