Enabling sustainability

I am just coming out the first plenary session of this EGI conference and finishing my first cup of coffee, ready to write my first post. I am really excited, a User Forum is always a special event, a meeting of "users", a great occasion to interact with colleagues and friends that are actually working on Grids, building them or running interesting projects thanks to them.

A word that echoed many times this morning was "sustainability". Our Grid initiatives are actually a powerful way to enable research sustainability, to allow a fair, democratic, collaborative access to resources. All kind of resources, not just computation.

I am particularly fascinated by the possibility of exchanging ideas, procedures (recipes to process data, if you like), strategies, experiences thanks to the Grid.

I think that the most important resource we have is not the over 200 thousand CPUs connected together, it is the 30 thousand users that thanks to the Grid and the Research and Education dedicated networks can talk to each other, can exchange working experiences, algorithms, traditions, data in a new way. A way which is more effective, fast, reliable, cheap; in one word, more sustainable.

If the future of collaborative research is standing before us like a beautiful place to be, sustainability for real user communities is the gate and Grid (and dedicated research networks) is the key to get through it.

Enjoy this conference!