The e-IRG is formed by official governmental delegates of all EU countries and a number of associated and candidate states. It was established to seek consensus on policy-level issues and recommend the best practices for

the pan-European grid and research network efforts. The main objective of the e-IRG is to support - on the political, advisory and monitoring levels - the creation of a policy and administrative framework for the easy and cost-effective shared use of electronic resources in Europe (focusing on Grid-computing, data storage, and networking resources) across technological, administrative and national domains. The decisions and policies emerging from this process have a profound impact for the structure, competitiveness and innovation potential of the European

Research Area.

The e-IRGSP2, funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework programme, is the second support programme for the e-IRG. The total budget for the 36 months duration of the project is 1.6 million euro. The objective of the

project is to provide means to facilitate the information flow between the e-IRG members, and to raise broader public attention to the activities of the e-IRG, in particular among key groups from the innovation potential point of view, such as different types of end-users and developers of the e-infrastructure technologies.

The e-IRGSP2 involves eight European project partners and is coordinated by CSC, the Finnish IT Center for Science. Other partners are:

• Netherlands Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF), Netherlands
• Emergence-Tech Limited (ETL), UK
• Laboratorio de Instrumentacao e Fisica Experimental de Particulas (LIP), Portugal
• Greek Research and Academic Network (GRNET), Greece
• Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), Greece
• Genias Benelux (Genias), Netherlands
• Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), Poland

More information is available at http://e-irg.eu and http://knowledgebase.e-irg.eu