Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) has been looking to the future, with the submission to the European Commission of their proposal for the third phase of the project, planned to start in April 2008. EGEE-II built Europe's largest production Grid, running around 100,000 computing jobs every day for scientists worldwide. With 94 partners in twelve regional federations, EGEE-III aims to expand this infrastructure and prepare for a long-term European Grid. The UK will continue to play a major role in the project, as one of the largest contributors to EGEE. The EGEE-III proposal has two overall goals. Firstly, to move European Grids from a project, funded for a limited time, to a sustainable infrastructure. Plans for this are based around the idea of National Grid Initiatives, which will manage long-term infrastructures in their country and federate them to a Europe-wide Grid. Secondly, EGEE-III will continue to provide a production Grid for European science, expanding it to include more computing resources, new communities and making it simpler to use. Bob Jones from CERN is the EGEE Project Leader, spearheading the marathon effort to draft and submit the bid, "We started preparations for EGEE-III in October 2006. The big change will be in the structure of the consortium, with a single point of contact for the research grid community in each European country as we work towards National Grid Initiatives. The work programme is tailored towards the transition to a sustainable model for the infrastructure, based on the European Grid Inititive/National Grid Initiative approach being prepared with the EGI Design Study project." The partners from each country will be grouped into Joint Research Units. The UK JRU will include 7 partners, all of which are also members of GridPP: the Science and Technology Facilities Council (lead partner), the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and Oxford, Imperial College London and Queen Mary University of London. EGEE's activities are split into three areas: service activities (SA), networking activities (NA) and joint research activities (JRA). The UK bid in EGEE-III covers all three, building on the work of GridPP and the NGS. Centred around Grid infrastructure (SA1) and running the Regional Operations Centre at RAL, the UK will also contribute to middleware support and maintenance (SA3 and JRA1). In networking activities, NeSC will continue to lead EGEE's training programme, while there are new roles for the UK in dissemination (NA2) and technical support for new communities (NA4). Robin Middleton managed the preparation of the UK bid to EGEE-III. He concluded, "A major focus of the UK component in EGEE-III is on helping to operate the Grid infrastructure. Providing a reliable service to users is key to successful exploitation of the technology by scientists." EGEE-III will last for 24 months, with a total manpower bid of almost 10,000 person months and an EC budget of Euro 36 million. As with EGEE-II, partners will provide extra effort to the project beyond that funded by the EC, bringing the total project budget up to Euro 70 million, and also contributing a further estimated Euro 50 million worth of computing resources. For further details, the EGEE-III Executive Summary is at its Web site. Credit: GridPP