January 21st, 2009

Dear JSDL Working Group,

The g-Eclipse Consortium announces today the first major release of the g-Eclipse framework. The framework provides an easy-to-use workbench to access worldwide Grid and Cloud infrastructures. These new emerging infrastructures are seen as key to the future IT world allowing end-users to utilize available computing and data resources dynamically and on-demand. The g-Eclipse project provides a graphical workbench, which enables seamless access to such worldwide infrastructures with the same simplicity as users accessing the
Internet from their web-browsers. The key feature of the g-Eclipse workbench is its proven independence from the underlying Grid and Cloud technology.

The first major release of g-Eclipse is now available for download. This release is the result of over two years development within the g-Eclipse European Project, supported by the European Commission under the contract IST-2006-034327. g-Eclipse development will, from now on, continue under the patronage of the Eclipse Foundation and within other European projects.

This major release contains support for the g-Lite and GRIA Grid Middlewares, and for the Amazon Web Services computing (EC2) and storage (S3) Cloud offering.

The g-Eclipse consortium consists of eight partners from six different European countries, and brings together experts in Grid and Eclipse technology. The University of Cyprus participates in the consortium through the High Performance Computing Systems Laboratory (HPCL).

Ready to use standalone packages for all supported platforms (Windows 32, Linux 32 and 64 bits, and Mac OS X) can be downloaded from
www.geclipse.eu/index.php

Additional information about g-Eclipse can be found at the attached Press Release.

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