On 1 May 2008, the BalticGrid Second Phase (BalticGrid-II) project has started. It is designed to increase the impact, adoption and reach, and to further improve the support of services and users of the recently created e-Infrastructure in the Baltic States.
This will be achieved by an extension of the BalticGrid infrastructure to Belarus; interoperation of the gLite-based infrastructure with UNICORE and ARC based Grid resources in the region; identifying and addressing the specific needs of new scientific communities such as nano-science and engineering sciences; and by establishing new Grid services for linguistic research, Baltic Sea environmental research, data mining tools for communication modelling and bioinformatics.
The e-Infrastructure, based on the successful BalticGrid project, will be fully interoperable with the pan-European e-Infrastructures established by EGEE, EGEE associated projects, and the planned EGI, with the goal of a sustained e-Infrastructure in the Baltic Region.
The e-Infrastructure of 26 clusters built in five countries during the first phase of the BalticGrid is envisaged to grow, both in capacity and capability of its computing resources.
The BG-II consortium is composed of 13 leading institutions in seven countries, with 7 institutions in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, 2 in Belarus, 2 in Poland, and one each in Sweden and Switzerland.
The overall vision is to support and stimulate scientists and services used in the Baltic region to conveniently access critical networked resources both within Europe and beyond, and thereby enable the formation of effective research collaborations.
More information can be reached from the official web page of the BalticGrid.