European Middleware Initiative

Last updated
EMI
Developer(s) EMI Project, partially funded by EU grant RI-261611
Stable release
3.0 / 28 February 2013
Operating system Scientific Linux 5 64bit, Scientific Linux 6 64bit, Debian 6 64bit
Type Grid computing
License Multiple. Each product has its own. Most of them are Apache or BSD.
Websitewww.eu-emi.eu (not active anymore)

The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) was a computer software platform for high performance distributed computing. It was developed and distributed directly by the EMI project. [1] [2] [3] It was the base for other grid middleware distributions used by scientific research communities and distributed computing infrastructures all over the world especially in Europe, [4] South America [5] and Asia. [6] EMI supported broad scientific experiments and initiatives, such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (for the Large Hadron Collider).

Contents

The EMI middleware was a cooperation among three general purpose grid platforms, the Advanced Resource Connector, gLite and UNICORE and the dCache storage software. [7]

The project ended on 30 April 2013.

Purpose

The purpose of the EMI distribution is to consolidate, harmonize and support the original software platforms, evolve and extend them. Redundant or duplicate services resulting from the merging are deprecated, in favour of new services added to satisfy user requirements or specific consolidation needs, standardizing and developing common interfaces. These include the adoption of a common structure for accounting, resource information exchange or authentication and authorization.[ citation needed ]

Input for the development activities is taken from users, infrastructures projects, standardization initiatives or changing technological innovations. The software products will be adapted as necessary to comply with standard open-source guidelines to facilitate the integration in mainstream operating system distributions. [8]

Collaborations

A cooperation with FutureGrid, a US distributed testbed for Clouds, Grids and high-performance computing, was announced in December 2011. [9]

In January 2012, the EMI project formalized a partnership with the iMarine project to create an open data e-infrastructure for fisheries management and marine conservation. [10] [11]

Users

By 2008 the EMI software distribution provided most of the middleware components which support the execution and completion of the millions of computational jobs handled by the 350 centers of the European Grid Infrastructure and the tens of petabytes of data transfers occurring between the storage systems of those centers. [12] [13]

EMI middleware was used in the WLCG infrastructure which supports, for example, the search for the Higgs boson (the God Particle) [14] and new types of matter searches of the physicists at LHC together with other research in astronomy, biology, computational chemistry and other sciences. [15]

License

There is no common EMI license though all licenses used by EMI are open-source. Each product has a long history behind its own license. Most are Apache or BSD. [16]

dCache products are released under the dCache Software License [17] but they adopted the Affero General Public License from 1 January 2012.[ citation needed ]

Products

The EMI products (components of the release) can be grouped in four categories (areas): computing, data, security and infrastructure. [18]

The first release [19] of the software is composed of 56 products packaged for Scientific Linux 5 (32, 64bit).[ citation needed ]

The second release [20] is also made of 56 products which are available for Scientific Linux 5 64bit and Scientific Linux 6 64bit. A subset of services is also available for Debian 6 64bit with more planned with the updates.[ citation needed ]

The third and final release [21] contains 61 products for the Scientific Linux 5 64bit (480 packages), Scientific Linux 6 64bit (474 packages) and Debian 6 (233 packages) Linux distributions. All components are supported on the Scientific Linux platforms while some are not on Debian.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU</span> Free software collection

GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux distribution</span> Operating system based on the Linux kernel

A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.

Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Source Mage</span> Linux distribution

Source Mage is a source-based Linux distribution descended from Sorcerer. Components of this operating system are downloaded as source code and compiled locally on the user's computer.

Technical variations of Linux distributions include support for different hardware devices and systems or software package configurations. Organizational differences may be motivated by historical reasons. Other criteria include security, including how quickly security upgrades are available; ease of package management; and number of packages available.

UNICORE (UNiform Interface to COmputing REsources) is a grid computing technology for resources such as supercomputers or cluster systems and information stored in databases. UNICORE was developed in two projects funded by the German ministry for education and research (BMBF). In European-funded projects UNICORE evolved to a middleware system used at several supercomputer centers. UNICORE served as a basis in other research projects. The UNICORE technology is open source under BSD licence and available at SourceForge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LAMP (software bundle)</span> Acronym for a common web hosting solution

LAMP is an acronym denoting one of the most common software stacks for the web's most popular applications. Its generic software stack model has largely interchangeable components.

BioLinux is a term used in a variety of projects involved in making access to bioinformatics software on a Linux platform easier using one or more of the following methods:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Advanced Resource Connector</span> Grid computing software

Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) is a grid computing middleware introduced by NorduGrid. It provides a common interface for submission of computational tasks to different distributed computing systems and thus can enable grid infrastructures of varying size and complexity. The set of services and utilities providing the interface is known as ARC Computing Element (ARC-CE). ARC-CE functionality includes data staging and caching, developed in order to support data-intensive distributed computing. ARC is an open source software distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Grid Infrastructure</span> Effort to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe

European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international research in many scientific disciplines. Following a series of research projects such as DataGrid and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, the EGI Foundation was formed in 2010 to sustain the services of EGI.

The D-Grid Initiative was a government project to fund computer infrastructure for education and research (e-Science) in Germany. It uses the term grid computing. D-Grid started September 1, 2005 with six community projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.

gNewSense Linux distribution

gNewSense was a Linux distribution, active from 2006 to 2016. It was based on Debian, and developed with sponsorship from the Free Software Foundation. Its goal was user-friendliness, but with all proprietary and non-free software removed. The Free Software Foundation considered gNewSense to be composed entirely of free software.

The Nordic Data Grid Facility, or NDGF, is a common e-Science infrastructure provided by the Nordic countries for scientific computing and data storage. It is the first and so far only internationally distributed WLCG Tier1 center, providing computing and storage services to experiments at CERN.

The INFN Grid project was an initiative of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) —Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics—for grid computing. It was intended to develop and deploy grid middleware services to allow INFN's users to transparently and securely share the computing and storage resources together with applications and technical facilities for scientific collaborations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux-libre</span> Version of the Linux kernel without proprietary code

According to the Free Software Foundation Latin America, Linux-libre is a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses. In the Linux kernel, they are mostly used for proprietary firmware images. While generally redistributable, binary blobs do not give the user the freedom to audit, modify, or, consequently, redistribute their modified versions. The GNU Project keeps Linux-libre in synchronization with the mainline Linux kernel.

The SHIWA project within grid computing was a project led by the LPDS of MTA Computer and Automation Research Institute. The project coordinator was Prof. Dr. Peter Kacsuk. It started on 1 July 2010 and lasted two years. SHIWA was supported by a grant from the European Commission's FP7 INFRASTRUCTURES-2010-2 call under grant agreement n°261585.

Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid, a nationwide computing structure, built in 2009-2011, under the scientific project PL-Grid – Polish Infrastructure for Supporting Computational Science in the European Research Space. Its purpose was to enable scientific research based on advanced computer simulations and large-scale computations using the computer clusters, and to provide convenient access to the computer resources for research teams, also outside the communities, in which the high performance computing centers operate.

DaviX is an open-source client for WebDAV and Amazon S3 available for Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOSX and Linux. DaviX is written in C++ and provide several command-line tools and a C++ shared library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ROCm</span> Parallel computing platform: GPGPU libraries and application programming interface

ROCm is an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. ROCm spans several domains: general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), high performance computing (HPC), heterogeneous computing. It offers several programming models: HIP, OpenMP/Message Passing Interface (MPI), and OpenCL.

References

  1. "Featured article: EMI, home to middleware". iSGTW. June 2010. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  2. "Presentation of the European Middleware Initiative project". GridCast. 16 September 2010. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  3. "European Middleware Initiative project presentation". GridCafè. 2010. Archived from the original on 4 December 2010. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  4. "The EGI Software Repository Portal". EGI. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  5. "Iniciativa de Grid de America Latina-Caribe. Resource Center Reference". IGALC. Archived from the original on 26 April 2012. Retrieved 25 December 2011.
  6. "Taiwan Grid Portal". TWGrid. Retrieved 26 December 2011.
  7. "EMI web site home page". EMI. Archived from the original on 26 December 2011. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  8. "EMI software releases introduction". EMI. Archived from the original on 17 December 2011. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  9. "EMI collaboration announcement. FutureGrid Portal". FutureGrid. Retrieved 26 December 2011.
  10. "iMarine collaboration announcement on CORDIS portal". CORDIS. Retrieved 14 February 2012.
  11. "iMarine collaboration announcement on iSGTW". iSGTW. Retrieved 14 February 2012.
  12. Vetterli, M. (2 July 2008). "ATLAS Computing: Dealing with Petabytes of Data per Year". 2008 22nd International Symposium on High Performance Computing Systems and Applications. IEEE. p. 84. doi:10.1109/HPCS.2008.36. ISBN   978-0-7695-3250-9. ISSN   1550-5243. S2CID   10190260.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  13. Jacqui Hayes (21 December 2011). "Happy 10th Birthday, WLCG!". isgtw. Archived from the original on 12 May 2015. Retrieved 23 December 2011.
  14. Leslie Versweyveld (13 September 2010). "WLCG working hard to make the Higgs particle theory come true". PRIMEUR. Retrieved 23 December 2011.
  15. "EMI services used in neuro-scientific grand challenge". isgtw. 3 October 2011. Retrieved 23 December 2011.
  16. "EMI DNA2.4.2, Exploitation and Sustainability Plan, EU Deliverable: D2.4.2" (PDF). EMI. 30 April 2011. p. 13. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  17. "dCache Software License". dCache. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  18. "EMI Software products categories". EMI. Archived from the original on 17 November 2011. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
  19. "1st EMI Release (Kebnekaise)". EMI. Archived from the original on 17 January 2012. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
  20. "2nd EMI Release (Matterhorn)". EMI. Archived from the original on 23 November 2014. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
  21. "3rd EMI Release (Monte Bianco)". EMI. Archived from the original on 15 June 2013. Retrieved 13 May 2013.