EU researchers will have sustainable and continuous access to the combined processing power of over 200,000 desktop computers in more than 30 European countries thanks to the European Commission funded European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) project launched. The EGI, the largest collaborative production grid infrastructure for e-Science ever created, will enable teams of researchers in different geographical locations to work on a problem as if they were in the same laboratory.

The Commission is contributing 25 million Euro over four years to the EGI-InSPIRE project to link the processing capacity of desktop computers when they would otherwise be idle and so give researchers the processing power needed to tackle complex problems in environment, energy or health.

Reinforcing research infrastructures such as EGI forms part of the Digital Agenda for Europe, the Commission's strategy to maximise the social and economic potential of information and communication technologies.

The massive processing capacity required in research on areas such as climate change and health can either be sourced from large super computers provided by the PRACE initiative (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), or by tapping the processing capacity of thousands of otherwise idle desktop computers connected via high-speed communications networks.

On average, a desktop computer remains idle for around 60-85% of the time. Networks like EGI distribute computing tasks involving large amounts of data among the processing capacity of many thousands of separate desktop computers, putting their idle processor cycles to productive use. EGI-InSPIRE will give European researchers access to the aggregated processing power of 200,000 desk-top computers hosted by more than 300 centres around the world. The Commission is contributing €25 million over four years to the 73 million Euro project. Other funding is provided from national sources such as National Grid Initiatives (NGI).

The precursor to EGI, the Enabling Grid for eScience, received more than 100 million Euro in EU funding over 8 years. It is used today by 13,000 researchers and for example helps physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to study the smallest known particles and helps biologists and scientists to develop new drugs for diseases like avian flu and malaria.

Enabling different research communities to hook up to the processing capacity of existing computers could also lead to major cost and energy savings. In the next few years, Europe is expected to invest more than 2 billion Euro in new ICT research infrastructures for physical sciences and engineering, energy, environmental sciences, biological and medical sciences, social sciences and humanities, and materials and analytical facilities. Significant savings can be made if researchers at these facilities use the processing power available via the EGI, rather than developing their own alternative networks or supercomputers. EGI may also be used to test various cloud-based technologies and services.