EGI-InSPIRE

The EGI-InSPIRE project (Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe) started on 1 May 2010, co-funded by the European Commission (contract number: RI-261323) for four years, as a collaborative effort involving more than 50 institutions in over 40 countries. Its mission is to establish a sustainable European Grid Infrastructure (EGI).

EGI-InSPIRE is ideally placed to join together the new Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs) such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids, for the benefit of user communities within the European Research Area.

The ultimate goal of EGI-InSPIRE is to provide European scientists and their international partners with a sustainable, reliable e-Infrastructure that can support their needs for large-scale data analysis. This is essential in order to solve the big questions facing science today, and in the decades to come.

EGI-InSPIRE will coordinate the transition from a project-based system (the EGEE series) to a sustainable pan-European e-Infrastructure. The four-year project will support grids of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-throughput computing (HTC) resources.

The project is ideally placed to integrate new Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs) such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids, to benefit the user communities within the European Research Area.

EGI-InSPIRE will collect user requirements and provide support for the current and potential new user communities, for example the ESFRI projects. The project will also support the current heavy users of the infrastructure, such as high energy physics, computational chemistry and life sciences, as they move their critical services and tools from a centralised support model to one driven by their own individual communities.