Within Europe the structure of funding for research projects is quite
different from that in the USA. We have a large number of countries which
all have their own strategies. Most international projects in western Europe
are funded through the CEC (Commission of the European Community) that have
a number of Directorates that take care of this. The most important for the
computer sience and telecommunications project is DG XIII. The CEC has ESPRIT
to fund regular projects by consortiums of industrial and research partners,
BRA to fund Basic Research and NOE to fund Networks of Excellence.
In the context of "Useful AFS servers" the last group is important. One of
these Networks of Excellence is CaberNet, which is the Network of Excellence
for Distributed Computing and Systems Architectures.
In this Network of Excellence, all major research institutes in Europe
in the area of distributed computing are united and exchange information
about their work, software etc in general and specialized workshops and
through their infrastructure.
This infrastructure is based on AFS. All major nodes within the CaberNet
will have an server that is part of the cabernet.ec.org cell. This set
of servers (we aim at 8 at the end of this year) will provide storage
and retrieval service for all associated nodes and for the main public.
The servers whill host technical reports, articles, bilbliographic
databases, european software, indexes to all kinds of relevant information.
This information service will not only be for distributed computing but also
provide service to other Networks of Excellence like those on Computanional
Logic and the one for Speech and Natural Language.
The first CaberNet servers are expected to be running after this summer,
and I will come back to this list with detailled information about how to
use the CaberNet service at that time.
Regards
Werner Vogels
Distributed Systems and Industrial Automation Group
INESC - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores
Rua Alves Redol, 9-6o - 1000 Lisboa - Portugal
Tel: +351 1 3100316, Fax: +351 1 525843,
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] / C=pt;A= ;P=inesc;S=werner
