The Open Software Foundation is to set up its promised European Research Institute in Grenoble, France, which will assume responsibility for advanced research and development projects in the field of operating systems and application environments. The Foundation says it chose Grenoble because of its active involvement in scientific and industrial re-search: 8,000 researchers and 200 firms are already engaged in research and development there, and the University of Grenoble’s information technology research laboratory employs 500 researchers. The centre will initially have 30 staff, and will host academic and industrial researchers on sabbatical leave. Its first task will be to establish a high-speed network linking major European research centres to test the new functions of distributed systems on wide area networks. The centre will have an annual budget of some $3.3m, and will be the European arm of the OSF Research Institute: a US centre will also be set up in the near future. Other work to be carried out there includes high speed networking, distributed information processing, massively parallel processing, and the human interface. Results will be evaluated by a Foundation development team, and integrated into the Open Software project, if deemed suitable. The Foundation is also planning a product development centre in West Germany.
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