The Ministery is now funding more than 150 D-Grid projects by awarding a grant of 60 million euro. By means of this high-tech strategy, the BMBF is also supporting the development of the D-Grid network in the future. At present, the second group of D-Grid collaborative projects is starting with a stronger focus on industry enterprises than before. According to Secretary of State Rachel, the network is due to a change: "At this point the Grid is particularly useful in science, but soon this technology will become a universal working tool in many other areas."

The goal is the daily use of the capabilities provided by the Grid in science and industry. To that purpose the BMBF is planning still in this year to make a further announcement for funding. In addition to the further development and adoption of the technological principles and the involvement of additional user groups from the industry enterprises, the development of business and user models for Grid services will be a focal point in the future D-Grid projects.

"D-Grid is now starting to bridge the gap between research Grids and industry Grids, with over 40 new partners from industry collaborating with their colleagues from research", stated Wolfgang Gentzsch, Manager of the D-Grid Initiative.

The main focus of the projects is to organize Virtual Organisations for a specific type of industry, and to implement a support platform on top of D-Grid. The projects application areas range from construction to finance and from aerospace to automotive. The goal of the call (call 3 of D-Grid) for this second wave was explicitely to attract new communities. In total 11 projects will be funded.

The BMBF will support the following new D-Grid collaborative proposals:

• AeroGrid: Goal of the AeroGrid project is to create an effecient Grid based workspace for German aerospcae research. The workspace will enable flexible co-operation in project based virtual environments. It will also allow to always have access to the latest software versions, data and computers. Attention will be paid to traceability of the way end results of computing are achieved. Project leader: German Center for Air- and Spacecraft (DLR) in Cologne. Industrial partners: MTU Aero Engines; T-Systems Solutions for Research GmbH.
• BauVOGrid: Virtual Organisations in building construction often consist of dozens of contractors and subcontracters in a complex network. Delegation of work and responsibilities are often not very well defined and hence is an error prone process than can lead to considerable costs. The goal of the BauVOGrid project is to increase the operationalibility of a real "Bau-VO" by applying a building-Grid. BauVOGrid will built an authentication and authorisation infrastructure on top of the basic D-Grid and combine this into a coherent management infrastructure for Virtual Organisation (VO) processes. All types of resources can be combined and presented in the office or at a construction site. Four key technologies are being integrated to achieve this result: D-Grid, Semantic Web, Process management and mobile information management. Project leader: TU Dresden, Institute for Building Informatcs. Industrial partners: Bilfinger Berger AG; BAM Deutschland AG; IDS Scheer AG; RIB Information Technologies AG; Seib ITC GmbH; TransMIT Gesellschaft fuer Technologietransfer mbH.
• BIS-Grid: Goal of BIS-Grid is to build a highly efficient computational enterprise Grid. BIS-Grid will organise and install a virtual organisation for this application area. It will build a horizontal service Grid, including service orchestration. On the conceptual application level, new ways of co-operation and new business models will be developed. Project leader: OFFIS - Institut fuer Informatik, Oldenburg. Industrial partners: CADsys Vertriebs- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH; CeWe Color AG & Co OHG; Kieselstein GmbH; Siemens AG -Siemens IT Solutions and Services.
• Biz2Grid: The aim is to provide a basis for the use of Grid technology in enterprises, to research enterprise and economic types of issues, and realize an accounting, pricing and billing infrastructure solution. The operability of the D-Grid expansion will be demonstrated by means of two commercial scenarios in the ERP domain and in the automotive industry. Project leader: IBM, Boeblingen. Associate industrial partner without funding: BMW Muenchen.
• D-MON: D-MON wants to create an overall monitoring servcies for D-Grid. It will horizontally integrate Grid resource and service monitoring in D-Grid, across a heterogeneous D-Grid infrastructure (Globus, UNICORE, gLite). D-MON will vertically integrate information services for Grid monitoring via a common user interface (GridSphere portal) and provide embedded support for VO management.
• F&L-Grid: Goal of the F&L-Grid project is building a generic service-oriented Grid by which IT services are offered via the DFN network (a high-speed network connecting German research institutes and universities). The services offered by the DFN are complemented by implementations of T-Systems SfR, the University of Karlsruhe, and the University of Marburg.
• FinGrid: The Financial Service Grid (FinGRID) project strives to identify suitable services and processes in the financial service industry and to develop Grid-based systems that enable financial service providers to better organise their processes and enable new applications. FinGrid is led by the University of Frankfurt. Industrial partners are IBM Deutschland GmbH and PA Consulting Group. Business-related partners without funding are Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Finanz_IT, DataSynapse. Building on the technical foundations of D-Grid new applications for banking service provisioning together with integrated pricing and accounting infrastructures will be developed.
• GDI-Grid: Geo-referenced data will be provided by and used in the Grid. Solutions for the efficient integration and processing of geodata on the basis of geo-information systems (GIS) and geodata-infrastructures (GDI) will be prepared and Grid-enabled service chains will be developed. These solutions will be evaluated by means of large simulations of catastrophes such as flood, alert expansion and the integration of real time traffic data for route optimization in case of a catastrophe. Project leader: RRZN Hannover. Industrial partners: ESRI Geoinformatik GmbH, lat/lon GmbH, Mapsolute GmbH, Stapelfeldt Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH. Associated industrial partners without funding: Bjoernsen Beratende Ingenieure GmbH, Bruel & Kjaer GmbH, IBM Deutschland GmbH, Intergraph GmbH, LGN-Landesvermessung und Geobasisinformation Niedersachsen GmbH.
• PartnerGrid: Goal of the PartnerGrid project is to create a configurable software platform based on industrial requirements that will be supported by a virtual organisation, consisting of customers, suppliers and servcie companies. The PartnerGrid will close the gap between current D-Grid middleware and the requirements of collaborative companies. The PartnerGrid platform will be tested with serveral applications scenarios for SME companies. Project leader: Fraunhofer IAO. Industrial partners: GNS mbH; MAGMA Giessereitechnologie GmbH. Associate industrial partners without funding: SCHMOLZ+Bickenbach GUSS GmbH & Co. KG; Rautenbach Aluminium-Technologie GmbH; Volkswagen AG.
• ProGrid: ProGrid is a collaborative project with automotive companies, software companies and research institutes. Goal of the project is to apply Grid technology to product development and to demonstrate usability for several application scenarios in the area of value creation chain and collaborative work. The implementation will be supported by a service Grid, part of D-Grid, that will be used by the ProGrid community. Project leader: science + computing ag. Industrial partners: FE-Design GmbH; INTES GmbH; PDTec GmbH; Wilhelm Karmann GmbH.
• SUGI: The goal of the SuGI project is to enlarge the user base for Grid computing. SuGI is targeted towards the thousands of middlesized computing centres of the German "Hochschule" - schools for higher education - and SME's. Both do not have much experience with Grid computing yet. SuGI will make the D-Grid infrastructure more accessible to them. Project leader: University of Cologne. Associated industrial partners without funding: IBM Deutschland GmbH; Sun Microsystems GmbH.

More information is available at www.d-grid.de