**1. Introduction**

In the last few years e-Infrastructures across Europe and India faced remarkable developments. Both national and international connectivity improved considerably and Grid Computing also profited of significant developments.

As a consequence scientific applications were in the position of taking substantial benefits from this progress. The most relevant cases are represented by High Energy Physics (with the contribution to the program of Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva) and Nano Science (exploiting NKN-TEIN3-GEANT interconnection for crystallography experiments with the remote access & control of experimental facility at the ESRF Synchrotron based in Grenoble, France directly from Mumbai, India). Other relevant application areas include Climate Change research, Biology, and several areas in Material Science.

Within this framework, in the last five years period two specific EU funded projects (the EU-IndiaGrid and EU-IndiaGrid2) played a bridging role supporting several applications that exploited these advanced e-Infrastructures for the benefit of Euro-India common research programs. EU-IndiaGrid2 - Sustainable e-infrastructures across Europe and India – is a project funded by European Commission under the Research Infrastructure Programme of the Information and Society Directorate General with the specific aim of promoting international interoperation between European and Indian e-Infrastructures. The project started in January 2010 and will close at the end of 2011. EU-IndiaGrid2 strongly bases and capitalizes on the achievement of its precursor the EU-IndiaGrid project (lasting from 2006 to 2009), whose contribution in bringing forward EU-Indian collaboration in e-Science and effectively mobilising actors on both sides, was widely recognised both in Europe and India. A crucial important part in the project activity was the support offered to selected applications which ranges from the training the user communities behind up to the porting of their scientific applications on the grid computing infrastructure.

This article aims to present and review the main e-Infrastructures development in India and their full exploitation by scientific applications with a focus on the role played by the EU-IndiaGrid and EU-IndiaGrid2 projects.

Applications Exploiting e-Infrastructures Across

and governance.

Fig. 1. NKN Layers

boundaries (see figure2).

Europe and India Within the EU-IndiaGrid Project 285

charge of the implementation. NKN project is aimed at establishing a strong and robust internal Indian network capable of providing secure and reliable connectivity. NKN brings together all the main stakeholders from Higher Education, Science, Technology, Healthcare, Agriculture, Grid Computing, e-Governance. The project aims also at facilitating connection between different sectorial networks in the field of research, education, health, commerce

This approach responds to a vision where different activities in the research domain but also other areas as Healthcare, or e-Governance can move from a silos-like structure to a gradual share of the upper layers from the network to the computing (grid and HPC) and the data management. This e-Infrastructure can provide a core of services not affordable to an individual application jumping across geographical, administrative and academic

The NKN infrastructure is entirely fiber based and owned by Government of India. It relies on a high capacity highly scalable backbone and covers the entire country. NKN will connect more than 5000 sites across the country serving million of end-users and all major escience projects. In the vision of Prof. Raghavan, Scientific Secretary to Principal Scientific Adviser to Government of India and Chief Architect and Chairman of Technical Advisory Committee of NKN, NKN represents for education a great integrator, making reachable and available the collective wisdom of institutions and laboratories with every Indian, irrespective of the geographical location, being able to benefit by accessing this vast

The paper is organized as follow: in the next section we will present and discuss the Indian scenario about the e-infrastructure while in section three we will discuss the role of the two EU funded projects for the Europe-India collaboration. In section four we present some significant technical achievements that made possible a full exploitation of scientific applications on the Euro-Indian infrastructure. In section five we will introduce the activities performed to promote applications and users communities within the e-infrastructure and will highlight some key examples of the scientific application ported and successfully exploited within the project and their interesting results. Some conclusions are then presented in the last section.
