Introduction
The Ibero American Program of Science and Technology for Development (CyTED, Programa Iberoamericano de Ciencia y Tecnología para el Desarrollo) was fund on 1984 by an International Agreement among 19 countries of Latin America, Spain and Portugal. It focuses in different fields covering from basic investigation to technologic development and innovation.
The main aim of CyTED program is to contribute in an active way to the economic and technological development of the Ibero American Region by means of the cooperation among the research groups of the universities, investigation centers and companies, so that the results can be transferred to the social policies and production systems.
Since the appearance of the Grid concept and the first experiences of its practical application (around 1995) up to nowadays, the development of these technologies has been constant. Grid emerged in the supercomputing field to fulfil the requirements of a number of scientific projects, being these a huge computing capacity ("computational grids") or handling enormous data bases ("data grids")
CyTED is the ideal framework for the creation and promotion of Ibero American computation research groups. It allows the access to an emerging technology and a greater integration among the participant countries. In the CyTEDGrid project participate groups from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Portugal and Spain. It is also important to create cooperation links among the different groups in several knowledge areas, not only in Grid technology.
In this context, the fundamental proposal is to work on the creation of a technological and human infrastructure joining the Ibero American groups working on computing science and with experience on some scientific application areas expected to be well grid-aware. The main goal of the project is to build a Grid network suited to support different sort of scientific applications, to analyze their performance and ease of programming and evaluation, and to suggest new developments in order to improve its possibilities. At the end of this project there will be a significant set of sample applications that could be used as demonstrators of the Grid technology to favour its spread to other scientific fields.