Common use of European and International Collaborations Clause in Contracts

European and International Collaborations. The EMI project vision and mission are part of a more general context of European and international collaborations. The interaction of relevant initiatives and the cross-fertilization of ideas are essential to achieve the proposed objectives. EMI has therefore already started discussions and exchanges of ideas and joint collaborations with a number of existing and proposed projects in various fields. Most notably the following collaborations have been discussed: EGI: is one of the two major EMI project customers together with PRACE. EMI will provide most of the middleware to be deployed on the EGI infrastructure and has designed together with EGI management the proposed middleware support and requirement analysis procedures. EMI will act as 3rd-level user support for its middleware in the EGI support chain and will actively participate to the definition of the UMD roadmap by taking part in the EGI Middleware Collaboration Board. Most of the proposed middleware innovation tasks have been already discussed and defined in collaboration with EGI management and technical staff to make sure EMI can clearly respond to EGI and NGIs operational and functional requirements. A letter of support from EGI is provided in Appendix A. PRACE: is the major EMI customer for what concerns High Performance Computing requirements. As for EGI, PRACE requirements have already been discussed during the EMI preparation phase to make sure that EMI can fulfil the expectations of the research communities using HPC resources through the UNICORE middleware. A letter of support from PRACE is provided in Appendix A. NDGF: although NDGF is expected to closely collaborate with EGI on infrastructure requirements and operations, a direct collaboration with its management and technical staff is required to make sure that the specific requirements of sites using ARC are correctly represented and taken into account. As for EGI and PRACE, NDGF has provided detailed requirements to EMI in terms of what services must be supported. A letter of support from NDGF is provided in Appendix X. XXXX XXX: as provider of the gLite middleware distribution and especially as the current major grid infrastructure provider, input from EGEE III to EMI has been fundamental to understand the future requirements not only of the infrastructures, but also of the grid user communities. EMI and XXXX XXX are working together in establishing a seamless transition of technologies and procedures to avoid any discontinuity in the provision of middleware and services. A letter of support from XXXX XXX is provided in Appendix A. OSG: EMI collaborations cannot be limited to European initiatives if the objective of establishing truly collaborative research infrastructures has to be achieved. EMI will keep a close collaboration with non-European infrastructures like OSG and with the software providers delivering middleware (for example VDT) used on those infrastructures. Major collaborative initiatives in interoperability and standardization either directly or through established bodies like OGF will be put in place by EMI at the beginning, seamlessly inheriting expertise from EGEE, UNICORE and NorduGrid. A letter of commitment to collaboration from OSG is provided in Appendix A. StratusLab, VENUS-C: the interoperability of traditional grid services with emerging clouds technology is one of the major technical innovation objectives of EMI. However, EMI doesn‘t plan to build new clouds management systems, rather to make sure that the grid services can efficiently exploit existing and new tools and technology. Collaboration roadmaps are being discussed with various initiatives, including the StratusLab and Venus projects, to make sure that any modification in the middleware services, required to allow sites and resource providers to exploit cloud and virtualization technologies like OpenNebula, Amazon EC2, Google and similar public clouds, can be correctly understood and implemented. EDGI: the interoperability of traditional grid services desktop grid technology has already started with gLite between the EGEE III and the EDGeS projects. EMI and XXXX will collaborate to further extend the interoperability to ARC and UNICORE to cover all grid middleware supported by EMI. Users Communities: EMI needs to establish clear, direct relationships with the user communities in order to understand their requirements and deliver the expected functionality. In this context, major projects in support of Virtual Research Communities and projects in the larger ESFRI context will be explicitly approached to define joint collaborations and collect use cases of specific interest to the major communities. EMI will also establish managed collaboration programs (‗Works with EMI‘) to make sure that applications providers have access to technologies and documentation well in advance and can deliver applications tested to be compliant with the EMI middleware. In addition, a number of projects have expressed a strong interest in making use of the software certification process that EMI will establish in support of its own engineering process. EMI is in favour of providing its tools, procedures and expertise to third-party projects with the two-fold goal of enforcing the correct integration of applications and tools with the EMI middleware and strengthening the reliability of the certification procedure through external contribution and review of functional and compliance test suites. Access to the EMI certification process will be granted on the base of Memorandums of Understanding as part of the ‗Works with EMI‘ collaboration program. EMI is committed to establish a functional Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) ecosystem where all the relevant projects and activities can provide specific expertise and results. To this effect work has been started with EGI, VENUS-C, Xxxxxxxxxx, EDGI and IGE with the collaboration of the SIENA project to understand the relationships among the projects and any opportunity for collaboration within the larger scope of a coherent European Roadmap to be coordinated by the European Commission. The initial collaboration has two specific goals: