E-infrastructures and E-Services in the Eastern Partnership Countries

Over the past several years the dependence of scientific research on access to large-scale computing and other e-Infrastructures services is rapidly increasing. e-Infrastructure designates a new generation of integrated ICT based infrastructures and is widely considered as a key enabler for scientific and social development. Such infrastructures are oriented to support a distributed medium based on high-bandwidth networks, respective data repositories and distributed computing infrastructures, such as Grids, High Performance Computing (HPC) systems, Clouds. All Eastern Partnership Countries (EaP) are deploying national e-Infrastructure components via collaborative initiatives based on European models. The main aim of this article is to introduce the status of e-infrastructures in the EaP countries emphasizing on networking and computational facilities, e-services and international collaboration. The overview of network infrastructures operated by the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and the computational and storage resources provided by the National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) are introduced including its collaborations with the pan-European research and education network GÉANT [1] and Grid infrastructures [2]. The key research applications and services are presented covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, such as particle physics, life sciences and computational chemistry, earth and climate sciences, astronomy and cosmology, computational engineering, etc.