D4Science - DIstributed colLaboratories Infrastructure on Grid ENabled Technology for Science

This project aims to continue the path that the GÉANT, EGEE, and DILIGENT projects have initiated towards establishing networking, grid-based, and data-centric e-Infrastructures that accelerate multidisciplinary research by eventually overcoming several crucial barriers that stand on the way, primarily those related to heterogeneity, sustainability and scalability. Such a scientific work needs to be supported by a wide range of heterogeneous and continuously evolving application resources, i.e., data and services, whose integration is very problematic as they are usually tailored to the specific requirements of the organisation that developed each one. Furthermore, the core functionality implemented by these applications (e.g., analysis, transformation, and extraction of knowledge from a large body of distributed and heterogeneous data) is computationally intensive and can rarely be sustained by individual organisations. Finally, setting up an appropriate collaboration framework is an expensive, time-consuming, and complex task that only few organisations can undertake.