Following the signature of the funding contract with the European Commission by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. as the coordinator of ExtreMat, all 38 project partners have been invited to the ExtreMat Kick-off Meeting at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany, on December 13 and 14, 2004.

Welcome addresses and greetings from representatives of the European Commission (Ms Cristina Marolda), the European Parliament (Ms Angelika Niebler), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Ms Vierkorn-Rudolph) and the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (Mr Bradshaw, Mr Tichmann) marked the officially start of the ExtreMat project.

After an introduction of the project and its participants by the project coordinator Prof Harald Bolt and his scientific coordinator Christian Linsmeier, the second day of the kick-off was devoted to internal working meetings with specific technical discussions and baseline definitions of the four ExtreMat subprojects.

This marked the start of a rather tight project schedule. The first months of the project will be dominated by the requirement definition and validation phase and by the concept definition and validation phase, both providing the basis for the future scientific and technical work of the project. The actual research and development phase will then start in mid-2005 and last 26 months, followed by an industrialisation phase which will complete the project in 2008/09.