E-science at Southampton

of

and Computer Science (ECS) has been awarded a €4.8 million European Union contract to establish the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for

(

).

OMII-Europe will provide software components for building e-Infrastructures within the European Research Area (ERA).

The initial focus for OMII-Europe is to facilitate the development and porting of a common set of application level services to a number of major Grid software distributions, and to develop tighter interoperability between those distributions.

‘This project is regarded within the European Union as a core infrastructure project that will shape the way e-Science is done within Europe for years to come,’ commented Professor Peter Henderson, who is leading this activity.

The award follows the recent success of ECS in securing an additional £5.6 million for the national Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute-UK (OMII-UK).