The first day of the workshop will present political, financial and international aspects of e-Infrastructure in Europe. The main topics will be: Sustainable e-Infrastructure fostering international and multidisciplinary cooperation; Synergies between structural funds, EU and national funding; Polish feedback for sustainable and reliable local infrastructure.

On the second day the focus will be Technology aspects. Presentations about ESFRI requirements and Grand Challenges of different applications will be given as well as a session on Data Infrastructures with presentations from existing data related projects. After lunch a panel discussion will follow about how to integrate the data infrastructure with the existing grid and HPC infrastructures and a panel discussion about users and infrastructure providers demands vs. offers.

The Technical Forum will provide an overview of the EGI community and review the community’s plans and progress towards the adoption of a federated virtualised infrastructure for European researchers.

The event will be co-located with the Open Grid Forum and Grid 2011 it will provide a unique opportunity to appreciate the current developments of e-Infrastructure in Europe and the standards development activity and longer-term computer science research being undertaken in this diverse and exciting field.

The meeting aims at introducing the new e-Infrastructures projects starting in 2011, to take stock of progresses in e-Infrastructures and to discuss future perspectives on data, cloud technologies and e-Science environments, HPC and Software.

The event will include an open debate on e-Infrastructures prospects for FP8 and an info session open to Q&A for Call 10.

The scope of the event is to show both to the scientific community and to the decision makers the outcomes of the Joint CHAIN/SPECIAL/EPIKH School for Grid Site Admnistrators (May 30-June 3, 2011, Rabat, Morocco) and of the Joint CHAIN/SPECIAL/EPIKH School for Application Porting (June 6-15,  2011 – Rabat, Morocco) raising their awareness about the usefulness of e-Infrastructures for e-Science and the importance of their sustainability.

The School for Grid Site Administrators aims at preparing system administrators on the installation of grid sites in order to put together these facilities to increase the size of the EUMEGRID-Support infrastructure. The School for Application Porting aims at increasing the number of scientific/industrial applications running on the EUMEGRID-Support production infrastructure.

The scope of the event is to show both to the scientific community and to the decision makers the outcomes of the Joint CHAIN/SPECIAL/EPIKH School for Grid Site Admnistrators (May 23-27, 2011, Stellenbosch, South Africa) and of the Joint CHAIN/SPECIAL/EPIKH School for Application Porting (May 30 – June 9, 2011 – Stellenbosch, South Africa) raising their awareness about the usefulness of e-Infrastructures for e-Science and the importance of their sustainability.

Both Schools are organised by the CHAIN, SPECIAL and EPIKH projects: the first one aims at preparing system administrators on the installation of grid sites in order to put together these facilities to increase the size of the SAGrid infrastructure. The second one aims at increasing the number of scientific/industrial applications running on the SAGrid production infrastructure.

The deployment of powerful computers, high-speed networks, and large scale storage technologies has made the academic and research landscape increasingly dynamic. Emerging professional are much more information and computer literate than ever before. They also have a very different expectation for both the university and work experience. These transformations oblige us in academia, research and the general information service provision industry to seriously seek and develop strategies and solutions to effectively harness the new opportunities.

The 2-days conference will address various issues of digital scholarship, digital curation and the accompanying emerging technologies.

The deadline to register for the conference is May 9, 2011.

Hosted by the Czech National Research and Education Network (CESNET), the conference presents an overview of the latest developments in research networking, both in the technical field and in the areas of application and management.

Over 500 participants including decision makers, networking specialists and managers from all major European networking and research organisations, universities, worldwide sister institutions and industry representatives are expected to attend the event.

Online registrations will be closed on May 8, 2011.

Co-sponsored by EU-IndiaGrid2, EUMEDGRID-Support, CHAIN and INFN, this international conference will address the role of e-infrastructures toward a better understanding of climate change from the global to the regional scales. The main goal of this event is to expose the participating scientists and stakeholders to modern e-infrastructures (which includes an HPC and Grid environments) so that the potential provided by this infrastructure for climate change research can be assessed. It will also provide the opportunity to enhance knowledge previously acquired and to acquire the core innovations emerging in this framework.

A series of sessions on May 17 will focus on regional perspectives from around the world: from India to Europe, from Latin America to Africa, e-Infrastructure is being exploited to improve research into climate change. Following a keynote introduction from Kostas Glinos, Head of unit, GÉANT and e-Infrastructures, European Commission, DG Information and Society, best practices and use cases will be highlighted offering important insights of regional advances in this field.

The participation in the event is free of charge.