Grid infrastructures are distributed installations of computing and storage resources connected with fast network connections often managed by different institutional bodies or administrative domains. These installations are normally connected with a so-called middleware layer. The middleware guarantees seamless and secure access to Grid resources. Nowadays these technologies emerge and will enable collaboration between distributed partners in academia and business. I.e. academia started with world wide Grid production services for scientists by creating Grid infrastructures like EGEE, D-Grid or TeraGrid using different middleware systems like g-Lite and Globus . Also in industry Grid frameworks start to emerge like Tivoli or Oracle 10-g. In this BOF we would like to gather interested people to form a wider community within the Eclipse community. The convenors are member of the g-Eclipse project. g-Eclipse started as a Eclipse Technology project to extend the Eclipse framework to enable seamless access to existing scientific Grid infrastructures with different middleware systems. But the goals of the g-Eclipse project are inline of business use cases. Interested people are invited to discuss with us the general roadmap of a future Grid framework within the Eclipse Foundation. Contributions from other projects and middleware providers are welcomed.

Dr. Harald Kornmayer works as principle researcher in the IT Research Division of NEC Laboratories Europe in St. Augustin, Germany. His research agenda focus on distributed wide scale IT systems including Grid and SOA technologies. Before he joined NEC Labs, he worked in different European and national. He is the Eclipse project lead of the g-Eclipse project since 2006 and coordinated the European project until September 2007 as scientific coordinator.

Markus Knauer works as Eclipse developer and consultant at Innoopract Information Systems. There he is involved in the development of the Yoxos-On-Demand Eclipse Distribution and is working on multiple projects developing Eclipse-based SDKs. He is project lead of the Eclipse Packaging Project and responsible for the architecture of the g-Eclipse project.