| Developer(s) | EMI project |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.0 / 12 May 2011 |
| Operating system | Scientific Linux 5 (32, 64bit) |
| Type | Grid computing |
| License | Multiple. Each product has its own. Most of them are Apache or BSD. |
| Website | www.eu-emi.eu |
The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a software platform for high performance distributed computing. It is distributed directly by the EMI project[1][2][3] which is behind its development, support and promotion and is also the base for other grid middleware distributions used by various scientific research communities and distributed computing infrastructures all over the world especially in Europe,[4] South America[5] and Asia.[6] EMI supports broad scientific experiments and initiatives, such as WLCG (the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.) A cooperation with FutureGrid, a US distributed testbed for Clouds, Grids and HPC, was announced in December 2011.[7]
The EMI middleware is a cooperation among three general purpose grid platforms, ARC, gLite and UNICORE and a storage solution, dCache. Each platform is made of different products which provide services.[8]
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The purpose of the EMI distribution is to consolidate, harmonize and support the original software platforms, evolve and extend them based on existing and new requirements. 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/authorization.
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.[9]
Today the EMI project provides and maintains most of the middleware components which support the execution and completion of the millions of computational jobs handled by the 350 centers of the EGI infrastructure and the tens of petabytes of data transfers occurring between the storage systems of those centers.[10][11]
In particular the EMI middleware empowers the WLCG infrastructure which supports, for example, the search for the Higgs boson (the God Particle)[12] 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.[13]
There is no common EMI license though all licenses used by EMI are open source. Each product having a long history behind adopted its own. Most are Apache or BSD.[14]
dCache products are released under the dCache Software License[15] but they will adopt the AGPL license from 1 January 2012.
The first release of the software is composed of 56 products. They can be grouped in four categories (areas): computing, data, security and infrastructure.[16]
EMI releases are of two types: Major releases and Component Releases which involve a single product.[17]
Major releases are delivered once per year. There are three planned major releases, named after famous European mountains, to underline the increasing level of features in each release.
| Release | Name | Release Date | End of Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | Kebnekaise | 2011-05-12 | 2013-04-30 |
| 2.0 | Matterhorn | 2012-04-30 | 2013-04-30 |
| 3.0 | Monte Bianco | 2013-02-28 | 2013-04-30 |
Minor Releases: contain interface or functional changes that are backwards-compatible with those of the current major release. They are issued a few times per year.
Revision Releases: available every week or two weeks. They contain only bug fixes.
Emergency Releases: contain only very specific bug fixes, typically security-related and are available as need, using emergency release procedures.