ABSTRACT
Experimentally-driven research is key to success in exploring the possible futures of the Internet. An open, general-purpose, shared experimental facility, both large-scale and sustainable, is essential for European industry and academia to innovate today and assess the performance of their solutions. Since computer applications now reach the home, the automobile, and the street, they go beyond making business and government services more efficient, and now form part of our social fabric. New ideas that start at the edge of the Internet, or of the telecommunications network, do wait to be carefully deployed, or “rolled out” by industry, but are instead pulled out by users from App Stores, to be tried at modest or sometimes zero expense. Innovations today come from all parts of the world. Skype is one example with its origins in Europe. Scandinavian firms have led the definitions of 3G and LTE, or 4G, mobile technologies. CERN has contributed the Grid approach to high performance, cost-effective computing.
