This week, INRIA, ERCIM and ETSI will hold in Sophia Antipolis, France, the 5th GRIDS@Work event. Grid computing offers technologies for solving complex IT problems using a large number of distributed computers, including Multi-Cores, Servers, Clusters and Clouds. During the week, finance simulations will be tested and executed over more than 5 000 computers scattered around the world. GRIDS@Work is composed of:

• A series of conferences and tutorials, including the EchoGRID and GridCOMP European projects, FMCO conference on formal methods for Components and Objects, as well as the 5th ProActive Parallel Suite User Group.
• The 5th GRID Plugtests with a contest on Grids for Finance and Telecommunications, the 2008 Super Quant Monte-Carlo Challenge - the goal of this challenge is to design and develop a Grid-enabled Option Pricing application, for pricing high dimensional European options or first generation exotic options, which can cope with time critical intense computational demand for complex pricing requests.

On 22 October two units of the European Commission DG Information Society and Media will organise an open technical concertation meeting dedicated to building the European roadmap for a critical IT aspect: Software and Services. On 23-24 October, the ETSI Technical Committee on Grid computing will organise a meeting on standardisation of the management of IT infrastructure, distributed resources, Grids and Clouds. The objective of this week-long event is to bring together the main players in the Grid domain, including Grid researchers, industrials and users, and to act as a stimulus for further advancement and integration. Sponsors of the event include Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Amazon WebServices, Grid5000 and InTrigger, the INRIA-born technology start-up ActiveEon, as well as LIAMA and Huawei from China. Website : www.etsi.org/plugtests/GRID2008/GRID.htm .