CoreGRID is a European "Network of Excellence" (NoE) funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Program. The network aims at strengthening and advancing scientific and technological excellence in the area of Grid and Peer-to-Peer technologies. Our vision of Grids is the following one:

"A fully distributed, dynamically reconfigurable, scalable and autonomous infrastructure to provide location independent, pervasive, reliable, secure and efficient access to a coordinated set of services encapsulating and virtualizing resources (computing power, storage, instruments, data, etc.) in order to generate knowledge"

To achieve the objective and to implement this vision, the Network brings together a critical mass of well-established researchers (155 permanent researchers and 168 PhD students) from 41 institutions who have constructed an ambitious joint programme of activities. This joint programme of activity is structured around six complementary research areas that have been selected on the basis of their strategic importance, their research challenges and the recognised European expertise to develop next generation Grid middleware, namely:

• Knowledge & Data Management
• Programming Models
• Architectural Issues: Scalability, Dependability, Adaptability
  
• Grid Information, Resource and Workflow Monitoring Services
• Resource Management and Scheduling
• Grid Systems, Tools and Environments

The Network is operated as a European Research Laboratory (known as the CoreGRID Research Laboratory) having six institutes mapped to the areas that have been identified in the joint programme of activity. The Network is thus committed to set up this Laboratory and to make it internationally recognised and sustainable. It is funded by a European grant (8.2 M euros) assigned to the CoreGRID NoE, for a duration of four years (starting September 1st, 2004), to cover the integration costs while the network partners cover the expense required to perform the research associated with the joint programme of activities.