STATE OF THE ART
State of the Art: Europe & Med
09 November 2009
The Mediterranean region is of strategic importance to the EU, in both economic (trade, energy, migration) and political (security, stability) terms.” In the economic domain, the area is still standing both fast demographic and labor force expansion, while a slow economic growth is resulting in high unemployment and stagnating incomes.
The economic development of the so called “developing countries” is worsened by the lack of access to knowledge, education and high-quality research laboratories and instrumentation. The opportunities for long-term economic growth are often further reduced by the difficulties in establishing a sustainable management of the environment and natural resources.
The strategic importance of the area has been recognized by Europe for many years and politically relevant initiatives have been carried out, especially in the last fifteen years. The Southern Mediterranean and Middle East countries are members of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership established by the Barcelona Declaration (1995) and the importance of the region is also witnessed by the creation of a specific financial instrument (MEDA) which has been replaced by the more general European Neighborhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI). The EUMEDGRID-Support proposal strictly follows the spirit of capitalizing on this recognition of strengthening partnerships.
Find out more about the individual state of play in Europe and the Mediterranean region as well as the various opportunities available.
With the rapid advancement of technology in the world of science calls for a demand for more and more computing power. The implementation and co-ordination of a grid infrastructure at a national (or larger) level opens up important opportunities to optimise the usage of existing, limited storage and computing resources, improve their accessibility and empower research groups from several domains.
There is no need for e-Infrastructures without a user community correspondingly exploiting them. The project has an important responsibility to support existing user’s applications and assist new applications that will run on the Mediterranean e-Infrastructure. This activity is also committed to study and deliver a strategy for the long-term sustainability of the support system that will be put in place during the project lifetime.
