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Meiosys, a provider of transparent middleware solutions for optimizing and protecting business-critical applications, today announced that Meiosys and its partners have been chosen for a major European project to develop highly available cluster solutions by the "Sixth EU Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6)." Meiosys and its partners have been selected after the review of over 40 submissions, and the project grant amounts to Euro 3.4 million ($4.2M). Meiosys partners include the Center of Excellence in Computer Sciences and Communications (Centre d'Excellence en Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication), Fujitsu Systems Europe and StorAgency in France, Dolphin Interconnect and Solutions and Scali in Norway, the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden and the Paderborn University-Center for Parallel Computing in Germany. The project, denominated HPC4U: Highly Predictable Clusters for Intranet Grids, attempts to solve current shortfalls of clusters in the areas of high availability, predictability and manageability. Over the past few years, organizations have implemented clusters based on commodity hardware for many of their commercial application needs as well as for their high performance computing activities to take advantage of their excellent price/performance ratio. Today, clusters can reach thousands of nodes. However, the challenge is to provide high availability and manageability to these clusters as they become more critical in the overall business operations and span multiple sites and geographies. The objectives of the HPC4U project are to expand the potential of the Grid approach to complex problems solving by means of deploying Grids that are able to meet specified Service Level Agreement (SLA), based on commodity-based clusters. These grids will offer higher levels of predictability, availability and flexibility by guaranteeing completion of high performance application runs, by dynamically migrating applications to optimize available hardware and software resources and by providing fault tolerance features for business continuance. Because the proposed solutions are generic (as opposed to Grids dedicated and tailored only to applications of a specific domain) and are based on modular architectures, the HPC4U Grids can adapt to ever changing requirements and environments, as well as integrate with existing grid investments. HPC4U grids will extend well accepted technologies (some of them being already the-facto standards) and integrate them with very innovative features (such as Grid embedded Fault Tolerance), for all the required Grid components such as compute nodes, data storage, communication resource management, and application environment management. "It is a great achievement for Meiosys to lead this exciting project," said Marc Rougier, President and CEO of Meiosys. "The market is demanding higher levels of availability and management flexibility to make Intranet Grids a reality. We are confident that this consortium of highly talented companies and organizations will deliver on the industry's expectations." The project partners include stake holders from all relevant infrastructure layers, from infrastructure hardware (computers, communication, storage), management middleware infrastructure virtualization and Fault Tolerance leveraging Meiosys' MetaCluster technology, resource management as well as industrial end-users who's requirements will serve as the basis for the overall project's specifications. The HPC4U partnership constitutes a balanced alliance of highly innovative Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), and well known and recognized European Corporations and organizations in the Grid domain such as SAAB AB and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute. This collaboration incorporates existing research across disciplines, and will leverage results of previous European Research and Technological Development programs.