A potential successor to the World Wide Web, which would enable users to tap into computer resources at high speeds, has been awarded funding of €9.8 million (£7.7 million) by the EU.

The DataGrid project will develop and implement a new distributed computing environment, specifically designed to analyse and move vast amounts of data, linking supercomputers, processor farms, disks, major databases, informatic systems and people by a high-speed network.

According to project directors, the DataGrid would provide scientists with flexible access to unprecedented levels of computing resources and would initiate an era of e-science.