Common use of Project Vision and Mission Clause in Contracts

Project Vision and Mission. The European Middleware Initiative is a close collaboration of the three major middleware providers, ARC, gLite and UNICORE, and other software providers. It will deliver a consolidated set of middleware components for deployment in EGI (as part of the Unified Middleware Distribution or UMD), PRACE and other DCIs, extend the interoperability and integration between grids and other computing infrastructures, strengthen the reliability and manageability of the services and establish a sustainable model to support, harmonise and evolve the middleware, ensuring it responds effectively to the requirements of the scientific communities relying on it. European scientific research has benefited in the past several years from the increasing availability of computing and data infrastructures that have provided unprecedented capabilities for large scale distributed scientific initiatives. A number of major projects and endeavours, like EGEE, DEISA, WLCG, NDGF, OSG, See-Grid, BalticGrid and others, have been established within Europe and internationally to share the ever growing amount of computational and storage resources. This collaborative effort has involved hundreds of participating research organizations, academic institutes and commercial companies. The major outcome is a number of active production infrastructures providing services to many research communities, such as High Energy Physics, Life Sciences, Material Science, Astronomy, Computational Chemistry, Environmental Science, Humanities and more. At the core of these rich infrastructural facilities lies the grid middleware, a set of High Throughput Computing (HTC) and High Performance Computing (HPC) software services and components that enable the users to access the distributed computing and data resources, execute jobs, collect results and share information. Middleware like gLite from the EGEE project, ARC from the NorduGrid Collaboration, UNICORE, VDT, Globus and other specific services for computing and data management have allowed thousands of scientific researchers to access grid- enabled resources and produce scientific results. After the necessary initial period of research and consolidation that took place in the past 6 to 8 years, the growing usage of distributed computing and data resources by scientific communities and individual researchers requires now the stabilization of the computing infrastructures and a simplification and standardization in the use of the associated software tools. It is of strategic importance towards the establishment of permanent, sustainable research infrastructures to lower the barriers that still prevent potential communities of tens of thousands of scientists and researchers to consider grids as a commodity tool serving their daily research activities. The ultimate vision is that establishing distributed scientific collaborations and using distributed computing and data resources should be as easy as opening a web application, entering simple identification information, entering a few clear parameters to define the task to be executed and its requirements and then waiting for the results to be made available in a well known, easily accessible place. The EMI project will make the realization of this vision possible by addressing and solving a number of problems that today still prevent users from easily accessing and using the existing computing infrastructures: • Usability will be enhanced by removing redundancy and consolidating the services, simplifying the security management without compromising its strenght, adding integrated support for high level gateways and portals and transparently making use of virtualization to increase resource availability and management. • Compatibility will be improved by removing proprietary interfaces in the middleware services and ensuring true interoperability through the adoption of agreed community standards. • Manageability will be improved by providing standard service configuration, monitoring and instrumentation interfaces and making accounting and other operational information more readily accessible. • Interoperability between grids, supercomputers and emerging computing models like clouds and desktop grids will be extended to address scalability and accessibility requirements. • Sustainability will be improved by establishing collaboration programs with commercial companies, adopting off-the-shelf components to reduce maintenance costs and to facilitate easier adoption by wider user communities. The definition together with the resource providers of measureable Service Level Agreements will provide the base for establishing more standard service provision business models.