EUMEDGRID

EUMEDGRID [http://www.eumedgrid.eu] is a project co-funded under the European Commission's FP6. The initiative officially started on 1st January 2006 with a single aim of assisting researchers of the Mediterranean Region to enter an extended European Research Area (ERA). The objectives of the project are to contribute to the creation of an eScience community and to provide support for an interoperable e-Infrastructure that will enable Grid computing operations between Europe and the Mediterranean. The integration into the wider European infrastructure will provide the research and education community of the region with access to a much larger pool of storage and computing resources than is currently available in the non-Grid environment and will help to bridge the digital divide gap between the less-resourced countries and the EU.

Within 18 months of activity, the project staff of 14 Mediterranean Countries created a human network in eScience reaching more than 400 people, and supporting the implementation of a grid pilot infrastructure and applications. Today, the EUMEDGRID pilot infrastructure includes 13 sites in 11 different countries, including Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Malta, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey.A set of pilot applications of regional interest, covering several application domains, including: Archaeology, Hydrology, Physics, Biology, Engineering, Robotics and Cognitive Sciences, were deployed on the EUMEDGRID infrastructure.EUMEDGRID acted as a trigger towards supporting the creation of National Grid Initiatives for the creation of e-Infrastructures in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia (while others are at a planning stage in neighbouring countries).