Description
e-Science and activities that build on e-infrastructure has
emerged on the scientific arena the last ten years or so. It
is continuing to grow in an ever increasing pace and is
gaining more and more impact on both science and society.
The underpinning of this development is the availability and
robustness of the underlying infrastructures and the ability,
often seeded by EU level project funding, to bring large scale
collaborative teams together to pursue science issue son
the infrastructures.
There are a number of challenges for a new community to
access e-infrastructures. Some of the challenges are purely
technical – the tools of the new community need to be
adapted to the infrastructure. Other challenges come from
new computational or technical requirements introduced to
the infrastructure pushing it into new realms of operation or
access paradigms. Bridging the societal differences of
individuals of sometimes very different backgrounds both
technical and cultural is a harder challenge than often is
appreciated.
A lot of these challenges will be polarized as larger scale
projects with strong e-Science and e-Infrastructure
components are starting up in Europe. We will look at these
issues taken input from our experience in bringing the
fusion community closer to the e-science and e-
infrastructure activities in Europe.
