The primary objective of the CROSSGRID Project is to further extend the Grid environment to a new category of applications of great practical importance, and into 11 new European countries.

The applications we are interested in are characterised by the interaction with a person in a processing loop. They require a response from the computer system to an action by the person in different time scales; from real through intermediate to long time, and they are simultaneously compute- as well as data-intensive. Examples of these applications are: interactive simulation and visualisation for surgical procedures, flooding crisis team decision support systems, distributed data analysis in high-energy physics, air pollution combined with weather forecasting. A visualisation engine should be developed and optimised for these applications.

To enable efficient development of this category of applications for the Grid environment, new tools for verification of parallel source code, performance prediction, performance evaluation and monitoring are needed. This, in turn, requires extension of the Grid by new components for application-performance monitoring, efficient distributed data access, and specific resource management. Users should be able to run their applications on the Grid in an easy and transparent way, without needing to know details of the Grid structure and operation. CrossGrid will develop user-friendly portals and mobile personalised environments and will integrate new components into the Grid and application development tools.

The elaborated methodology, generic application architecture, programming environment, and new Grid services will be validated and tested thoroughly on the CrossGrid testbeds. This will result in further extension of the Grid across Europe. In our CrossGrid development we will exploit all the available achievements of DataGrid, EuroGrid and other related projects in a way which enables their interoperability. CrossGrid will closely collaborate with DataGrid.

The Project is focused on the issues proposed in the Cross-Programme action:

The CrossGrid testbed will be conducted in the context of full-scale applications, compute- and data- intensive, from scientific and industrial fields: health, physics and environment management. The deployment on many testbed sites distributed across Europe will expand the Grid community and provide a realistic framework to assess organisational issues.

The distributed and interactive nature of these applications motivates the use of a Grid-specific software architecture. Their development needs enabling technologies and new services that will be implemented and integrated in the form of middleware and toolkits, including verification of parallelisation, resource scheduling, performance prediction and monitoring. User access to the CrossGrid resources via specific portals will ensure their user-friendliness, and ubiquitous computing and access to information will be improved with the use of roaming techniques.

Interoperability with other Grid testbeds is a key point in the CrossGrid project. Complementarity will be considered from the architecture definition to the testbed set-up. In particular, co-ordination with the ongoing DataGrid project will be promoted. Moreover, as Cross-programme Action Lines should seek to work closely with the most relevant projects in the Key Actions, grouping into cross programme clusters could be expected. This will also result in a common infrastructure.

In summary, the Project addresses all the points made explicit in CPA9, matches the priority criteria for the Workprogramme 2001, and will contribute to the programme objectives by providing an answer to the interactive compute- and data-intensive needs of a wide user�s community, promoting the use of the Grid as an instrument for European competitiveness in research, industry and business.

The essential novelty of this Project consists in extension of the Grid to a completely new and societally important category of applications. The new methodology, generic application architecture, programming environment, and new Grid services will be validated and tested thoroughly on the CrossGrid testbeds. This will result in further extension of the Grid across Europe into 11 new countries.