ERCIM

The 5th Technical Committee (TCom) meeting took place between the 1-5 of December in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting was hosted by CERN (Meyrin site).

A D4Science TCom event is a face-to-face meeting which aims to collectively address any technical issues that arise along the course of the project and to define a concrete plan to properly address them. It is open and flexible, i.e. besides technical partners the whole consortium is potentially invited to attend dependent on the topics to be discussed.

[22-07-2008 Published on CORDIS: http://cordis.europa.eu/wire/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.Detail&rcn=17667 ]

Catherine Marchand
ERCIM
2004, Route des Lucioles
06902 Sophia Antipolis
FRANCE
catherine[dot]marchand[at]ercim[dot]org
Tel: +33492385072

D4Science is one of the main European e-Infrastructure projects, involving 11 participants such as the European Space Agency, and the WorldFish Center, supported by the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research. Co-funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, the D4Science project was launched in January 2008.

D4Science aims to continue the path that the GEANT, EGEE and DILIGENT projects have initiated towards establishing networking, grid-based and data-centric e-Infrastructures that accelerate multidisciplinary research by overcoming several crucial barriers such as those related to heterogeneity, sustainability and scalability.

According to Donatella Castelli, Scientific Coordinator, CNR, "By building upon the experience acquired over the past years, we are now ready to put into production the first e-Infrastructure that will enable sharing and seamless access to heterogeneous content, service and computer resources".

The exploitation of this e-infrastructure will be initiated by serving two major fields, Environmental Monitoring as well as Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management.

As a result, thousands of scientists will obtain increasingly more facilities for creating Virtual Research Environments based on shared computation, storage and generic service resources offered by EGEE and DILIGENT at a European level. They will also benefit from data and domain-specific service resources provided by large international organisations among the project participants. Cooperation between these participants will also encourage the use of data streams from diverse scientific communities to perform socio-ecosystem modelling.

The primary clients of these Virtual Research Environments serving specific scenarios will be researchers, decision-makers, international and government officers, and non-governmental organisations worldwide.

As stated by Krystyna Marek, GÉANT & e-Infrastructure Unit, European Commission, "We expect that the D4Science infrastructure will have a multiplicative benefit to many scientific fields. In a not distant future it will be able to act as a catalyst for increasing the resource sharing, cooperation and cross-fertilisation among multiple communities that is necessary for addressing the many grand challenges of science and society."

As an example, the work on ecosystem modelling that the two communities will perform in D4Science can be applied to the whole domain of biodiversity management, conservation and exploitation.

Notes to editor:
Scientific coordination of D4Science is headed by CNR while the management of the project is ensured by ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.

Website: www.d4science.eu

Contact: donatella[dot]castelli[at]isti[dot]cnr[dot]it

You will find an introduction to D4Science in the latest issue of ERCIM News 74, with a theme dedicated to "Supercomputing at Work": http://ercim-news.ercim.org/content/blogcategory/84/625/. The article appears in both the online and print editions.

ERCIM News is the magazine of ERCIM and is published on a quarterly basis. It reports on joint actions of the ERCIM partners, and aims to reflect the contribution made by ERCIM to the European Community in Information Technology. Through a series of short articles and news items, it provides a forum for the exchange of information between the institutes and also with the wider scientific community. The printed version of the current edition has a circulation of 11,000 copies.

More information: http://ercim-news.ercim.org and http://www.ercim.org/