INESC-ID is one of the most dynamic research institutes in Portugal in the areas of electronics, information systems and telecommunications. In close cooperation with its partners, INESC-ID has emerged as an institution of reference, intensely involved in a number of high-visibility projects that have defined the state of the art in these areas, both at national and international levels. The institute integrates a body of highly qualified researchers, which includes more than 100 with a PhD degree and a large number of postgraduate students. The majority of the senior researchers are professors, most of them from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisboa. The intense activity developed by INESC-ID since its inception in 2000 resulted so far in more than 1800 scientific papers, dozens of industrial prototypes as well as a number of patents and awards. INESC-ID participated so far in around 50 European Commission funded projects, from which it coordinated 5.

INESC-ID is represented in the project by the Distributed Systems Group that does research in the areas of algorithmic, middleware and communications support to build complex, dynamic, highly dependable and secure distributed applications. The ultimate motivation for its research is to make programmers' lives easier by providing the right abstractions, mechanisms and techniques for improving the programmability, performance, fault tolerance, and security of distributed applications.