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A simple, but important distinction for RIs: Single-sited RIs such as the particle accelerator CERN, the European Northern Observatory ENO, the internationalexperimental fusion reactor ITER, or the British Library offer their users a facility, resource, service, or tool in a single location. Distributed RIs consistof a network of facilities, resources, services or tools in different sites, which are managed in a co-ordinated way. Examples are the European oceanobserving system Euro-ARGO, the European Mouse Mutant Archive EMMA, the international EGEE GRID computing facility, or the planned EuropeanExample 3: Euro-ARGOARGO is a project to set up a global ocean observingsystem with partners from all over the world. Theobjective to develop a global array of autonomousprofiling floats spaced every 3° (~300 km) throughoutthe icefree areas of the deep oceans can only bereached through close international co-operation. Thedistributed RI offers the potential to greatly enhancethe present capability to measure in real-time thetemperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of theoceans, which can sustain a better understanding ofclimate variability over space and time and underpinoperational oceanographic applications. The Europeanpart Euro-ARGO has the aim to deploy, operate andmaintain an array of 800 floats, of which 250 need tobe substituted every year, and provide a world-classservice to the climate research and environment monitoringcommunities. This requires investment costs of4 M€ and annual operation costs of 8 M€. Euro-ARGOis one of the RIFI case studies.Extreme Light Infrastructure ELI. Both,single-sited and distributed RIs, can bevirtual RIs, which make their serviceselectronically available to their users. VirtualRIs include the pan-European highspeed,high capacity communicationnetwork GEANT, the European SocialSurvey ESS, the European BioinformaticsInstitute (EBI), or the International MedievalBibliography. RIs can involve hugefinancial investments for constructionand operation. A spread in constructioncosts from less than 20 M€ to more than500 M€ has been observed in a recentsurvey of European RIs5, while the annualoperation costs varied from 0.25M€ to more than 10 M€ (including muchhigher amounts as well). The largest RIsare therefore often multi-national facilitiesfunded in a joint effort by differentcountries. Multi-nationally funded RIs,but also many national large-scale RIsare of European relevance. They offerunique research possibilities to internationaluser communities, are recognisedcentres of scientific excellence, employand train scientists and students frommany countries, attract young people toscience, promote multi-national collaborationand networking, advance technologyand contribute to innovation. Theyplay a central role in creating the ERA,18Example 4: ELIThe Extreme Light Infrastructure ELI is a pan-Europeanmulti-site facility from the ESFRI Roadmap withlocations in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania.The ELI project aims at providing the scientificcommunities with levels of power about 1,000 timeshigher than achieved in any laser facility worldwide today.This laser has many direct applications in cosmologyand high-energy physics. The project is supportedby fifteen partners from thirteen European countries.Each of the three host sites will be dedicated to a differentapplication, namely the Czech site to beamlineexperi ments, the Hungarian site to attoscience, andthe Romanian site to laser-induced nuclear physics.For each of the ELI sites the construction costs areestimated to about 260 M€ and the operation costs toroughly 30 M€ per year. The Romanian project, ELI-Nuclear Physics, has been studied by the RIFI project,while the Czech project has conducted a limited studyapplying parts of the RIAM methodology.