The DILIGENT infrastructure enables scientists to collaborate on common research challenges through a seamless access to all the resources they need regardless of their physical location. The resources shared can be of very different nature and vary across application domains. Usually they include content resources, application services that manipulate these content resources to produce new knowledge, and computational resources, which physically store the content and support the processing of the services.

Two complementary application scenarios are contributing in such an infrastructure with content resources, specific application services, and proprietary computational resources. They are managed as DILIGENT sub-VOs and are named ImpECt and ARTE.

Currently, the DILIGENT infrastructure is part of the EGEE pre-production (PPS) infrastructure by contributing with a number of sites (6 sites, 3 are part of EGEE PPS and 3 are planning to join in June 2007). Detailed information about the sites are continuously updated by CERN and can be found here.

A Monitoring Tool has been implemented to continuously provide an observation and measurement of the status of the infrastructure. It provides live access to the two DILIGENT sub-VOs and to the DILIGENT development VO. The monitoring tool for the available infrastructure can be found here.

The core technology supporting the DILIGENT infrastructure is a service-oriented application framework named gCube. gCube enables scientists to declaratively and dynamically build transient Virtual Research Environments (VREs) by aggregating and deploying on-demand content resources, application services, and computing resources. It also monitors the shared resources during the VREs lifetime guaranteeing their optimal allocation and exploitation. Finally, it provides mechanisms to easily create VREs dedicated web portals through which scientists can access their content and services.