EMI Manual

Submitted by Kathryn Cassidy on Wed, 18 Jul 2012, 11:22:47 GMT

What is EMI?

European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a software platform for high performance distributed computing.

It is at the core of grid middleware distributions used by scientific research communities and distributed computing infrastructures all over the world including WLCG--the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid--which supports, for example, the search for the Higgs boson and new types of matter searches of the physicists at LHC, together with other large scientific challenges in astronomy, biology, computational chemistry and other sciences.

Being a close collaboration among well-established grid middleware providers and other specialized software providers, EMI proposes itself as a leading platform for scientific grid computing and looks at expanding outside of its natural environment.

EMI on FutureGrid

EMI have created a number of Virtual Appliances on the FutureGrid cloud infrastructure. They are available on the following resources:

  • Sierra
  • Hotel
  • Foxtrot

Launching the EMI appliances

To launch the emi VMs you must use the Nimbus cloud-client tool. For instructions on how to install and configure Nimbus please see the Nimbus tutorial.

Once you have a working Nimbus client you can search for the emi appliance you want to use using the following command

$ bin/cloud-client.sh --list

You should see a number of EMI appliances in the list. Choose the one you want to run and instantiate it with the following command:

$ bin/cloud-client.sh --run --name <VM appliance name> --hours <number of hours>

For example, if you want to run the emi-unicore appliance for three hours, you might use a command like the following (check the exact name of the appliance first)

$ bin/cloud-client.sh --run --name emi1-unicore-centos-5.3-x64-p1.gz --hours 3

Once the VM is running you should have a working EMI server. You can log in as root using your ssh key.

Available EMI Virtual Appliances

At present there are two EMI virtual appliances available, for UNICORE and dCache, but more are in development. You can find more detailed instructions on each of these virtual appliances at the following urls:

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