Beyond this integration effort pooling together European excellence, both the research community is now looking forward to broadening the scope of their scientific collaboration to weight even more substantially in the international GRID panorama.

Like the inherent nature of Grid technologies, the scientific ambition is not only focussed on Europe, but also distributed world-wide. In this perspective, the Grid@Asia initiative was designed to set up strategic workshops in Asia to push further the expansion of European Grid expertise through co-operation with Asian and international leading teams in the field.

These strategic workshops were organised in Beijing , Seoul and Shanghai to foster collaboration with both the local and international GRID communities. Each workshop followed a customised agenda inspired from the workplan of international Grid research projects, and gathered around 90 to 200 participants, 20 from Europe, and 70 to 160 from Asia. The European delegation was essentially composed of representatives of European Grid projects or networks (FP5 and FP6 projects) not only for their federating and integrating vision, but also because of their capacity and desire to foster co-operation with significant Grid actors.