As London is the world's fifth largest city, with a hugely diverse cultural population, it makes the perfect testbed, said Mr Rattner.

BBC: Intel to use London as a smart city lab

Building on these efforts, I challenge broadband providers and local leaders to bring at least one gigabit testbed community to all 50 states by 2015.

FORBES: Faster, Sooner: Why The U.S. Needs 'Gigabit Communities'

DRIVER-II will consolidate these efforts and transform the initial testbed into a fully functional, state-of-the art service, extending the network to a larger confederation of repositories.

UNESCO: Global Open Access Portal

To address these questions, a distributed testbed infrastructure was deployed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and the National Energy Research Scientifi c Computing Center (NERSC).

FORBES: Cloud Computing Not Quite Ready for the Lab: US Government Report

Certainly, the partners want the ISS to become more of an "exploration testbed" in the decade ahead - a platform to try out the new approaches and new technologies that will help humans move deeper into the Solar System.

BBC: Simulated Mars mission 'lands' back on Earth

The training provided the participants with the overview of the grid network, the architecture of the gLite middleware, an introduction to job submission, data management and grid workflows, the concept of virtual organizations and the virtual organisation management system, as well as practical exercises on the use of gLite on the GILDA testbed.

UNESCO: Education