The European Commission entrusted ERCIM with the coordination of 'EchoGrid', a project to foster collaboration between the European Union and China in Grid computing research and technologies by developing short-, mid- and long-term visions in the Grid computing field.
Thanks to the substantial investments and the numerous initiatives launched at the national and European levels, Europe has succeeded in establishing a leading worldwide position in Grids. China has well established programs and a critical mass of researchers in the Grid technological area. Most of the application areas have similarities or well defined boundaries that match European Grid areas. This has been demonstrated during two workshops organised in Beijing and in Shanghai in June 2005 and February 2006 by the Grid@Asia project. EchoGrid will build on this experience to develop a 'collaboration roadmap' that identifies common areas of interest and opportunities for collaboration on Grid technologies between the European Union and China.
In the frame of the programme, ERCIM will organise a set of workshops on strategic topics defined by a group of experts open to researchers and engineers from both academia and industry to define a better view of the research and development activities both in China and Europe. A mobility programme is also planned to encourage exchange of personnel across countries and institutions.
The major outcome are roadmaps developing a shared European and Chinese vision (3, 5 and 10 years terms) of future Grid research perspectives. It is epected that the roadmaps lead to a joint technological and research agenda and to long-term collaborations between key Grid initiatives in the EU and China.
Partners
The project consortium gathers five partners from each Europe and China. The Europan partners are: the National Technical University of Athens, Greece; ATOS Origin SAE, Spain; Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A, Italy; THALES, France. The Chinese partners are: Beihang University; Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences; National University of Defence Technology, Huawei Technologies Co.,Ltd .
First International Conference
A first joint EchoGrid and EUChinaGRID international conference will be held on 24-25 April 2007 at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, China. The conference will be followed by a two days tutorial on ProActive at the SuperComputing Centre, CAS coorganised with the Sino French Lab in Computer Science, Automation and Applied Mathematics (LIAMA)on 26-27th April.
This conference will present complementarities between European and Chinese initiatives and disseminate the goals and foreseen activities of EchoGRID. The conference promotes cross-fertilisation between Grid-related projects and initiatives in Europe and China by interacting with top Grid research and industrial communities, exchange experiences and best practices for Grid middleware and applications interoperability.
Programme highlights include topics such as 'Enterprise Challenges with Grids', 'Interoperability, New Programming Paradigms/SOA', 'New Priorities for Management in Grids', and 'Ongoing Research versus Enterprise Achievements'. The programme also features a live demo and poster session, as well as a roundtable on future collaborative scenarios led by experts at the forefront of Grid technologies.
Links:
EchoGrid: http://echogrid.ercim.org/
Grid@Asia: http://gridatasia.ercim.org/
EU ChinaGrid: http://www.euchinagrid.org/
Grid Technologies in the IST Programme: http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/grids/
Please contact:
Bruno Le Dantec, ERCIM office
E-mail: bruno.le_dantec
ercim.org
