Today, scientists collaborate with colleagues from other countries on a day-to-day basis. Hence they expect that supporting e-Infrastructures are collaborating too and they can use whatever computational resources they need and want to use together. Although there are a number of international Grids, still many Grid islands exist.

In their own way the EDGeS and SEE-GRID-SCI projects already were working on connecting 'Grid islands'.

EDGeS is focusing on connecting Desktop Grids that often have immense computational capacity, with service Grids, such as EGEE and EELA. For scientific users, the benefit is that they have access to a much more number crunching capacity than they had on their isolated Grid.

SEE-GRID-SCI is working on connecting the national Grids in South-East Europe.

Both projects have extensive user and application support that is of key importance to efficient use of the Grid.

In the collaboration, SEE-GRID-SCI will connect its infrastructure to the EDGeS 3G Bridge that connects already many Desktop Grids (including SZTAKI Desktop Grid in Hungary, AlmereGrid in The Netherlands, IberCivis in Spain, and University of Westminster in the UK) and the EGEE and ELAA service Grids.

The two projects' application departments will cooperate on getting applications to work on the combined Grid e-Infrastructure. Also dissemination and training activities will be coordinated. For instance, SEE-GRID-SCI will lecture on the combined EDGeS-EGEE Grid Summer School held in July 2009 in Budapest.

"The collaboration between SEE-GRID-SCI and EDGeS is a good example of how sustainable pan-European Grid e-Infrastructures can be built out of national and regional resources", said Peter Kacsuk, EDGeS project manager.

"Leveraging computing resources over national borders as well as over technologies is a key to success for a pan-European e-Infrastructure", said Ognjen Prnjat, SEE-GRID-SCI project manager.

The MoU immediately sparked work between the technical groups of EDGeS and SEE-GRID-SCI to practically bridge the Grids.