Project Details

Project Lead

Morris Riedel 

Project Manager

Morris Riedel 

Project Members

Danilo Dongiovanni, Kathryn Cassidy, Shahbaz Memon, shiraz memon, Gábor Szigeti, Marcelina Borcz, Jason Milad Daivandy, Marco Verlato  

Supporting Experts

Gregor von Laszewski  

Institution

Juelich Supercomputing Centre, Federated Systems and Data  

Discipline

Computer Science (401) 

Abstract

The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a joint project of the middleware consortia gLite, ARC, UNICORE and dCache. Funded by the European Commission, the major goal of this project is to harmonize a set of EMI products out of the different middleware components by providing streamlined EMI releases. The aim of this Future Grid project is to set up a permanent Testbed of EMI releases for exploration by US partners in order to disseminate the activities happening in Europe. Training material will be provided so that the EMI products can be tested and evaluated by potential US stakeholders using FutureGrid for a hands-on experience with European middleware.

Intellectual Merit

While the European middleware evolved over a decade mostly driven by European research communities, the use of FutureGrid might reveal additional requirements in order to satisfy more and more emerging truly global research communities. Understanding and analysing potentially different approaches to distributed computing and possibly different used techniques represents therefore an intellectual challenge.

Broader Impacts

Disseminate the existence of European middleware within the US and exploring potentially synergetic products provided by FutureGrid to limit duplicate developments and to engage in fruitful collaborations in order to support the requirements of global research communities.

Scale of Use

Small and very limited use initially and during installation procedures. For preparation of large events like the EMI Technical Conference, we potentially would like to ask for more resources to handle a peak of users during tutorial sessions.

Results

* FutureGrid provides its users access to European middleware services out of the EMI releases * Permanent endpoints of EMI products * Tutorial material for the installed EMI products in order to organize tutorial sessions * Interoperability checks with other existing software stacks in FutureGrid * Integration checks whether EMI products can actually work in virtualized environments such as provided by FutureGrid * Several scientific case studies that explore the possibility of using FutureGrid for feasibility studies before large-scale production runs elsewhere * at least one publication per year indicating the use of FutureGrid resources with the EMI products * EMI Webpage part that reports about FutureGrid and its EMI activities