1st Challengers Workshop on Business and Improvement

Friday 25 May 2007

Challengers Workshop on Business and Improvement of Life Foresight

The workshop provided the basis for a report to the European Commission on the future business uses and exploitation of grid technology to guide their investment in research into grid and service oriented architectures (SOA).

The workshop attendees included chief technologists from major corporations including Atos Origin, Platform Computing and eBay. STFC were represented by Prof Keith Jeffery (link opens in a new window) and e-Science's Michael Wilson.

As a member of the Challengers project consortium the Science and Technology Facilities Council e-Science centre organised this event to facilitate the convergence of developments in grids for business with the scientific grid infrastructure. The strategy of Science and Technology Facilities Council e-science is to encourage the commercial use of grid technologies in order to support the competitive commercial provision of these technologies. Grid technologies are essential to support the National Grid Service and grids in Europe (link opens in a new window) and across the world (link opens in a new window) which it can link to. Such multinational grid provision is needed to provide the peak capacity requirements demanded to compute the simulations required in potential disaster situations (link opens in a new window) and to exploit opportunities such as new scientific discoveries and the data from new scientific facilities. Future Challengers' workshops to produce reports for the EC will address related issues concerning the future of research into grid technologies.