Commodity-based Grids are spreading across the industry, supported by their excellent cost/performance ratio. However, they lack manageability and reliability. The objectives of the HPC4U project are to expand the potential of the Grid approach to Complex Problems Solving by mean of Grids able to meet a Service Level Agreement (SLA), based on commodity-based clusters providing Quality of Service thanks to the necessary infrastructure and software.

This will provide the Grids with the possibility to guarantee the completion of jobs in operational environments and therefore leverage the larger uptake of Grid type architectures. Because it is generic (as opposed to Grids dedicated and tailored only to applications of a specific domain) and thanks to its modular architecture, this Grid will be customisable and interoperability with existing Grid will be possible. This will open new perspectives for Grid usage of Grid for new services as they are today even more strongly required by the industry. HPC4U, will extend well accepted technologies (some of them being already the de facto standards) and integrate them with very innovative features (such as Grid embedded Fault Tolerance), for all the components required for a dependable Grid, which are infrastructure, storage, communication resource management, and application environment. This next generation Grid will therefore overcome present architectural and design limitations hampering the use and wider deployment of computing and knowledge Grids.

The project partners include the stake holders from all relevant levels, from infrastructure hardware (computers, communication, storage), middleware (infrastructure virtualization, communication, Fault Tolerance enablers, resource management), as well as industrial end-users whose requirements will serve as a base for the specification of the overall project. As these partners form a balanced alliance of highly innovative SMEs, and well known and recognized European actors of the Grid domain, the collaboration will take advantage of existing research across disciplines, and leverage results of previous programmes.