Introduction

The fundamental purpose of this proposal is to extend DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications), an existing FP6 I3 Grid empowered research infrastructure. The present proposal is therefore not a new I3 initiative, and it can only be assessed and understood as imbedded in the context of the existing DEISA supercomputing Grid research infrastructure.

DEISA is a consortium of leading national supercomputing centres in Europe that are jointly building and operating a distributed terascale supercomputing facility. This objective is being attained by a deep integration - using modern Grid technologies - of existing national high performance computing infrastructures. A fundamental objective of the DEISA Consortium is to deploy a production quality, persistent, Grid enabled pan-European supercomputing environment that will act as the integrating infrastructure for High Performance Computing in Europe. DEISA's technology choices, based on the concept of integration of resources and services, as value to existing infrastructures.

This ambitious roadmap cannot be achieved without a permanent reassessment of strategic and technological objectives. The present proposal extends DEISA by adding new Service Activities that result from the experience gathered during the first year of operation of DEISA and from requirements resulting from the expansion by three new major partners. The Service Activities include a second generation high-bandwidth dedicated network across eleven supercomputing platforms in Europe, an additional middleware activity and new innovative services in the user and applications area, in particular scaling and optimisation of grand challenge applications, distributed visualization, portals and Web interfaces. This proposal also intends to strengthen the pan-European impact by associating seven additional high performance computing organizations in Europe as explicit subcontractors.