The European Commission, through the GÉANT and e-Infrastructures Unit of the Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures Directorate, aims at creating a high-capacity and high-speed communications network to the benefits of European researchers, mainly through GÉANT, which is a high speed link reserved exclusively for research and education, as well as specific high-performance Grid-enabled advanced infrastructures.

The term e-Infrastructure refers to the new research environment in which all researchers – whether working in the context of their home institutions or in national or multinational scientific initiatives – have shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), regardless of their type and location in the world.

The GÉANT and the e-Infrastructures Unit aims at changing the way research is carried out, sharing access to computing and data resources, for the benefit of virtual communities. It particularly supports:

• Development of high-capacity and high-performance communication (GÉANT) and grid empowered infrastructures
• Deployment of a coordinated pan European scientific data infrastructure
• Promotion and expansion of e-Infrastructures among user communities
• Construction of new computation and data treatment facilities (petaflop supercomputing)
• Improvement of multidisciplinary grid and supercomputing infrastructures
• Stimulation of new organisational models
• Exploitation of the power of e-Infrastructure as a vector of international cooperation