Supply of, and demand for computational capacity is elastic. Some companies are are falling short, others have capacity in abundance. More often than not the need or surplus in computational power or storage capacity is temporary. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the surplus of one corporation could (temporarily) alleviate the wantage of the other. A consortium of ten organisations from six European countries started on a collaborative project to enable just that. The Contrail project aims to design, implement, evaluate and promote an open source computational cloud wherein users can limitlessy share resources.

The Contrail project will run for a period of three years and will show tangible results:

1. Contrail will provide a complete Cloud platform which integrates a full Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform- as-a-Service offer.
2. Contrail will allow Cloud providers to seamlessly integrate resources from other Clouds with their own infrastructure.
3. Contrail will break the current customer lock-in situation by allowing live application migration from one cloud to another.
4. Contrail will be fully available in open-source.