The basis will be formed by national Grid organisations established by national research funding organisations. In each country these are being formed along the local science funding structures. At a European scale, one will first see some clustering: an example is Sirene, in which a number of Grids in smaller European countries collaborate. An international Grid organisation, for instance EGI - European Grid Organisation, will take care of the Grid interconnections, much like GEANT does for networking. For supercomputers, the PACE initiative seems to play the same role. This emerging picture also seems to be encouraged, and most likeley be fincancially supported, by the European Commission. Both EGI and PACE have applied for European funding earlier this month.

Dieter Kranzmueller, from the Joh. Kepler University Linz and Coordinator of EGI, talked about "Towards a European Grid Infrastructure". The European Grid Initiative (EGI) is aimed at establishing a sustainable grid infrastructure in Europe. EGI is expected to enable the next leap in European research infrastructures. EGI builds on top of the National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) that are or are expected to operate the Grid infrastructures in each country. EGI will link existing NGIs and actively supports the set-up and initiation of new NGIs. Within the May call of the EU FP7, the EGI Preparation Team submitted a proposal for an EGI Design Study. The goal of this EGI Design Project is to evaluate use cases for the applicability of a co-ordinated effort, identify processes and mechanisms for establishing EGI, defining the structure of a corresponding body, and ultimately initiating the construction of EGI.

Kimmo Koski from CSC Finland elaborated on the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PACE) initative. It is the result from the "HPC in Europe Taskforce" (HET). HET was established in June 2006 and published its final rport with recommondations on a new European supercomputing infrastructure in January 2007. It is a development related to the ESFRI roadmap that includes plans for 35 new major European infrastructures, one of them is the European HPC Service. The basic tool for modelling the European HPC ecosystem is the performance pyramid, with a few very large European supercomputers in the top of the pyramid. One of the key ideas from HET was to develop the different levels in the pyramid in a balanced way. An FP7 project proposal PACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) for the preparatory phase of HPC service including Petaflop/s centres has also been prepared for the May 2007 call.

The European Grid Infrastructure builds on the National Grids. In the UK the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII-UK) is supporting the national e-Science community for a number of years. OMII-UK aims to provide software and support to enable a sustained future for the UK e-Science community and its international collaborators, said Steven Newhouse, Director OMII-UK at the E-IRG workshop. A recent Survey of User Priorities for e-Infrastructure for Research (SUPER) undertaken amongst groups who had tried to use the e-Infrastructure highlighted several critical barriers to general uptake by the research community at large. The complexity of using the infrastructure with relatively little benifit, is one of the major problems.

OMII is concentrating on delivering the middleware. The national Grid organisation in the UK is called "National Grid Service" (NGS). Director Neil Geddes told there recently had been a NGS workshop on sustainability. Four areas were highlighted: Services, User focus, Support for collaboration, and Centre of expertise and evangelism. For the European Grid intiatives he had the following advice: Governments and Funding agencies need to drive the development of an agreed and shared vision for the future, engaging key stakeholders. Joining the broad infrastructure, as a user or provider, must become easier, justifiable and self sustaining. Also one has to work with, and for, key users.