The project was a 56 month 25 MEuro FP7 EU project aiming to support science and innovation by providing a lasting operational model for e‐Science to coordinate the infrastructure and deliver integrated services that cross national borders. EGI-InSPIRE was responsible for continued technical support to existing European research collaborations as well as for engagement with new research communities and community building in the private and public sector. The project was responsible for developing the European Grid and Cloud infrastructure into a platform that relies on externally sourced software technologies. Processes for software quality validation and verification, software distribution through public repositories and staged rollout were defined. EGI-InSPIRE was also responsible for providing user-facing services for the discovery and distribution of community-specific code and a training marketplace federated training activities carried out by the members of the EGI collaboration.
EGI Foundation role in the project:
EGI.eu is the coordinating partner of the project and provides leadership in all the activities.
Relevance for EGI:
The EGI-INSPIRE project aimed to establish a sustainable European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) by bringing together National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) and other organisations across the EU. It was a collaborative effort involving more than 50 institutions. The original impetus for EGI-INSPIRE was the heavy computational requirements of big data users at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, where physicists adopted the paradigm of distributed computing worldwide to solve their big data problems. They used EGI to analyse the data from the Large Hadron Collider that led to the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson.