In the context of the upcoming calls in the 7th Framework Programme of the EU, the project is already starting to prepare for a third phase of the EGEE project as well as the long term sustainability of the infrastructure (referred to as European Grid Initiative or EGI). The Management unanimously agreed to encourage the research and academic partners in the project to organize themselves as so-called Joint Research Units, a scheme set-up by the EC to allow groupings of institutes to participate in projects, with a nominated lead partner appearing in the contract on behalf of all members. For more information, please have a look here http://cern.ch/egee-technical/JRU/towards-fp7.html 

The gLite Workload Management Service has been undergoing severe stress testing which resulted in significant performance and reliability improvements. These improvements will soon be part of the gLite release. Work continued on support for 64bit architectures, the upgrade to Scientific Linux 4, the upgrade of our globus components to GT4-pre-webservice, and support for Debian alongside scalability, reliability, and performance improvements. These upgrades should be released by the end of 2006.