BeGRID, the Belgian Grid for Research has organised an Infoday on Belgian e-Infrastructures on 14 December 2015.

The event was organised in a collaboration between:

• Belspo (Belgian Federal Science Policy Office)
• EWI (Economy, Science and Innovation Department of the Flemish public administration)
• SPW (Wallonia Public Service)
• Belnet (Belgian National research and education network)
• CÈCI (Consortium of high-performance computing centers)
• VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Centre)

The day was divided in three sessions:

• During the morning, the speakers offered an overview of the existing Belgian e-infrastructures (“What we have”).
• After lunch, projects and initiatives in various fields were presented with a focus on the challenges and expected needs in the future (“What we need”).
• At the end of the day, a panel of discussion was organised with providers, users, and funding agencies.

Conclusions of the day:

• Assets
• Networking and computing e-infrastructures widely available
• Needs
• Collaboration is essential between all stakeholders, and especially between academia and industry
• Catalogue of existing e-infrastructures and services
• Better training for (non IT) users
• Challenges
• Solutions for data storage and data management
• Sustainability of e-infrastructures, updated equipment
• Open access policies (for everyone)

All the presentations of the event are available here: http://www.begrid.be/index.php?module=blog&id=52

If you want to know more about this, please contact the CETAF Secretariat: info@cetaf.org