BEinGRID

BEinGRID is the European Union’s largest integrated project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research, part of the European Union’s sixth research Framework Program (FP6). Grid technology is in a critical transition as it moves from research and academic use to wider adoption by business and enterprise. The use of Grid technology brings many benefits such as the greater utilisation of IT resources and increased business flexibility with consequent reductions in overall cost for end users, including security enhancements. Grid enables large, complex systems to be utilised effectively, promoting the sharing of networked resources and supporting new business processes across distributed administrative domains.

The lack of business reference cases to persuade potential users to explore the economic benefits of Grid technology is hampering commercial exploitation of Grid solutions across the European Union (EU). Increased general deployment of Grid technologies into the market will strengthen the EU's competitiveness and leadership in this key area. It is then time to push this technology adoption and to stimulate research into innovative business models.

The mission of BEinGRID is therefore to establish effective routes to foster the adoption of Grid technologies across the EU and to stimulate research into innovative business models using Grid technologies. BEinGRID catalyse European business adoption of Grid services and lead to widespread uptake of these important technologies for the benefit of all. The strategic objectives of Beingrid are:

• To understand the requirements for Grid uptake in the commercial environment, involving software vendors, IT integrators, service providers and end-users.
• To enable and validate the adoption of Grid technologies by business.
• To design and build a Grid toolset repository with components and solutions based on the main Grid software distributions including: the Globus Toolkit, gLite, Unicore, Gria and basic Web Service specifications.
• To develop and deploy a critical mass of Grid-enabled pilots, embracing a broad spectrum of economic sectors with different needs and requirements in terms of technological Grid challenges.

To meet these objectives, BEinGRID is undertaking a series of targeted Business Experiments (BEs) designed to implement and deploy Grid solutions across a broad spectrum of European business sectors (including the media, financial, logistics, manufacturing, retail and textile sectors).