The Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems of MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute plays a leading role in the research of cluster and grid technologies in Hungary.

MTA SZTAKI has significant experience in doing research and providing infrastructure services in the filed of service grids. MTA SZTAKI was a member of the European DataGrid project and was leader of the Grid Monitoring workpackage of the European GridLab project and the Automatic performance Analysis and Grid Computing WP of the European APART-2 project. MTA SZTAKI participated in the EGEE project as the Central-European Regional Training Centre of EGEE and contributed to the NA4, NA2 and SA1 WPs. It led the Grid Middleware WP of the SEE-GRID project. Currently, LPDS is a partner in the EGEE-II, SEE-GRID-2, ICEAGE and CoreGrid FP6 projects. It was also member in the GridCoord projects.

MTA SZTAKI plays a leading role in Grid Computing in Hungary. MTA SZTAKI participated in the vast majority of Hungarian Grid projects (DemoGrid, ClusterGrid, SuperGrid, Chemistry Grid, Hungarian Grid, SuperClusterGrid, etc.) and led several of them. MTA SZTAKI is a funding member of the MGKK (Hungarian Grid Competence Centre) consortium (http://www.mgkk.hu/), established in 2003 in order to coordinate Grid activities in Hungary.

CIEMAT, Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas Medio Ambientales y  Tecnológicas: It is a Public Research Institution dependent on the Ministry of Education and Science. From its creation in 1951 it has developed and leaded R&D projects in the fields of Energy, Environment and Technology, placing the institution in the international vanguard of science and the technology and having a close relation with other research groups with similar objectives. As a technological research centre is the link between basic research, mainly performed in the academic world, and the national industry.

The main activities are related to: basic strategic research aimed at generating knowledge; strategic technological research aimed at generating new technologies; technological development aimed at developing and transferring technology; testing, mainly of a commercial type; and training aimed at improving the professional qualification of the research teams. The scientific and technical team at CIEMAT is composed of approximately 1,150 people, of whom 47 % have a University degree. CIEMAT, with a great number of facilities, some of them unique in Spain, has a wide presence in the national and international scientific and technical forums.

The Foundation for the Development of Science and Technology in Extremadura- Fundecyt has a central role in the economic, structural and innovation strategy development in the Region of Extremadura. It is a non profit institution and its main objective is to stimulate co-operation between firms, universities and public administrations in order foster regional development.
It is an initiative launched with the support and guidance of the Regional Government, the University of Extremadura and two regional financial Institutions. The Regional Government presides the governing bodies of Fundecyt and supports directly its activities through the Regional Budget Law. Nowadays, the Foundation has more than 90 employees, of which around 15 are directly involved in research and technological development activities.
 

Fundecyt is member of GEMAGRID project to promote the interactive use of Information and Communication Technologies in Municipalities in Extremadura Region. GEMAGRID  solution is adapted to small size City Councils situated in rural surroundings (access through a Shared Services Centres, benefits derived from a scale economy, with different degrees or supports levels, and the services externalization, etc.).

INRIA, INSTITUT NATIONAL DE RECHERCHE EN INFORMATIQUE ET EN AUTOMATIQUE, the national institute for research in computer science and control, operating under the joint authority of the Ministries of Research and of Industry, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST).

The Institute also plays a major role in technology transfer by fostering training through research, diffusion of scientific and technical information, development, as well as providing expert advice and participating in international programs. By playing a leading role in the scientific community in the field and being in close contact with industry, INRIA is a major participant in the development of ICST in France.

The University of Westminster's Centre for Parallel Computing (CPC) is focused on research and application of distributed and parallel computation technologies. CPC is engaged in research on Grid computing including its Web services-oriented approach based on OGSA/WSRF platforms. CPC was involved in the “OGSI Testbed” e-Science project to evaluate the OGSI platform and its GT3 implementation on a UK multi-site testbed. Within the framework of the project the research team developed the Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Applications (GEMLCA). GEMLCA supports migrating legacy code applications to the Grid using legacy code as Grid compliant Grid service. Users can either access pre-defined Grid services through a Grid portal or dynamically create and deploy new Grid services.

The current research activities of CPC cover both computational and desktop Grid, for example: automatic service deployment, Grid registries and repositories, interoperability in Grid computing, service-oriented approach in desktop Grids, performance management, workflow design and its execution in Grid, development of Grid user environments to support both design and execution of Grid-based applications. CPC has installed and runs a BOINC-based Westminster desktop Grid in 2006 using 500 computers as workers. The desktop Grid has 35 registered users and runs the DSP sampling frequency calculation project. Currently, we are working on migrating two projects – health service data mining and image rendering- to the desktop Grid.

Cardiff University (CU) is a publicly funded university that has a strong research programme in the areas related to EDGeS, such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking, and data analysis.  The Distributed Collaborative Computing Research Group (Taylor) specialises in the use of distributed computing technologies for supporting collaboration. This includes the sharing and reuse of middleware and applications, the collaborative exploration of large data-sets through visualisation, and problem-solving environments/portals for interfacing with distributed and collaborative resources.

The group's research is both in the areas of P2P and Grid computing, with expertise in the use of the Grid in e-Science, with particular focus on specifying distributed scientific applications through P2P networks and the composition of Web services. CU is one of the top 10 research universities in the UK, with its School of Computer Science receiving a ranking of five (out of 5*) for its achievements.  In addition to the high marks for both the University and the School, Cardiff University is home to the Welsh e-Science Centre (WeSC), one of 8 centers established by the UK government to support e-Science and Grid computing research.

The University of Coimbra in Portugal is one of the oldest in Europe, having been founded in 1289. It has nearly 20.000 students, of which 9.000 are in the Faculty of Science and Technology (FCTUC). The Dependable Systems Group (DSG), which is part of the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), represents FCTUC in the project. One of the main areas of activity of DSG has been the development of tools for parallel programming, mainly programming support libraries, like the porting of PVM and MPI for Windows 32-bit, and portable libraries for specific paradigms of parallel programming, like master-slave, GRID-decomposition, DSM and Linda. The implementation of MPI for Windows was the world first and is now a full-fledged commercial offering from Critical Software.

he group has also done research work on the web-based parallel computing, particularly using the mobile agent paradigm. The focus is now essentially on the dependability aspects of GRID computing, where we are working on techniques for dependable GRID-services, benchmarks for dependability assessment, robustness execution of applications in multi-cluster infrastructures and fault-tolerant techniques to include in GRID Middleware. In the past, the Dependable Systems Group has participated in several projects in the area of parallel computing. Current projects include CoreGRID, a FP6 Network of Excellence in Grid Computing and P2P Systems and a recently funded GRID project for simulation and analysis of ATLAS/LHC data (GRID/GRI/81727/2006).

Stichting AlmereGrid - Foundation AlmereGrid operates the first City Grid in the world. Currently it operates a service that enables citizens, SMEs and other organizations to donate unused computing cycles to scientific programmes. As the world's first, it especially addresses "early majority" people and organizations.
Many companies have signed a partner agreement with AlmereGrid. They contribute resources, such as systems, software or services, and participate in the developments. AlmereGrid partners include: SARA, Oracle, Rabobank, IBM, NWO/NCF, LogicaCMG,  ALCA, Foundry, ALCA, Engage Technology.

AlmereGrid is working on a test for a Grid based back-up for SME's. Part of an SME's hard disk will be used by back-up for other SME's. Just as with more traditional Grids, security is paramount in this type of resource sharing. The test is part of a European IST project BEinGRID, Business Experiments in Grids.
Another innovative use of the City Grid that is in the planning phase, is to provide a "Grid based building assistent" for people who want to build their own home (about 25.000 in the coming years).

IN2P3 is the institute of the French CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) that promotes research in nuclear and particle physics. To advance the state of these disciplines, IN2P3 scientists and engineers participate in a wide variety of scientific and technical projects. Current experiments are producing and will continue to produce enormous data sets that require massive, distributed computing resources for analysis. Consequently, IN2P3 and CNRS have been strong collaborators in regional, national, and European computing projects.

Of note are its contributions to the European DataGrid, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE), and EGEE-II projects; these contributions include middleware integration, release management, deployment, resource provision, and expansion of the grid user community. Regional projects further increase the expertise of IN2P3. For example, the Linear Accelerator Laboratory (LAL) in Orsay, France, one of the IN2P3 laboratories, has collaborated on the XtremWeb project, improving the code to production quality and using it for large-scale simulation.