EMI: Scaling new heights
Neasan O'Neill on the launch of EMI-1
One of the main problems facing the distributed computing infrastructure community is interoperability. The various disciplines, requirements and resources mean that the solutions that have been created may not always work together. The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is starting to solve this problem and next week sees their first full release, EMI-1.
Funded for three years by the European Commission, EMI is bringing together middleware experts from around Europe, and further afield. However, they know they have a difficult task and in honour of this have decided to name their releases after some of the biggest mountains in Europe. EMI-1 is codenamed Kebnekaise, the double peaked mountain that is the highest in Sweden.
While there is a mountain to climb EMI are not doing it alone. They are working with the existing solutions, ARC, gLite and UNICORE, including contributions from these three, as well as other technology providers, like dCache. The collaboration hopes to create a product to help improve access to all distributed computing resources.
Currently the future looks bright for EMI. Having signed a Memorandum of Understanding and a Service Level Agreement with EGI earlier this year, starting official discussions with PRACE and now their first full release the project hopes to move onwards and upwards.
Florida Estrella, the project's Deputy Director, says: “The team has worked extremely hard over the last year, this is the first step to creating a unified middleware for distributed computing infrastructures. We hope this and future releases will benefit the users and providers throughout Europe and beyond.”
