SCIENCE
EGI releases the first Unified Middleware Distribution
The software provisioning team at the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has released the first version of the Unified Middleware Distribution. This is a major milestone in providing a consistent platform for all researchers in the European Research Area to gain access to suitable and integrated computing resources.
For many years the European grid has been offering researchers a distributed computing system across different middleware solutions and in that time has provided almost 2.5 billion CPU hours to scientists across Europe. EGI has been working with external technology providers to offer a set of well-defined, stable and general-purpose software components to meet their needs. The chosen components are collectively known as the Unified Middleware Distribution (UMD) and have been verified to work in the environment used within EGI. The first version of the UMD that successfully passed all testing procedures was released last week, with further versions anticipated in the near future.
Every research community has different goals and requirements for their computing and data needs and many have developed and maintained their own solutions, which work for them. The goal of the UMD is to provide a system that the community’s existing solutions can easily plug in to, not replace, so that these solutions can be deployed at scale across Europe. So for the last year EGI and its partners have been working with technology providers and users to work out what they need to offer as a sustainable base on which users can build.
Leading the work has been Michel Drescher, EGI’s Technical Manager, he is excited by what they have achieved. “Just getting this far has been a mammoth task. We have consulted a huge range of stakeholders, reviewed every software package on the grid and come up with what we believe provides the best support structure we can. This is however only a first step, we will learn a lot from this initial deployment to improve future releases”.
Technical Description
UMD 1.0.0 is the first release of UMD-1 (Unified Middleware Distribution) made available for the European Grid Infrastructure. This initial release will contain only the most critical products from EGI's Technology Providers as agreed by the TCB (Technology Coordination Board) on behalf of the EGI community.
Contact Info
For further information about the UMD, its goals and surrounding processes, and more information about how to engage as a Technology Provider with EGI, please send an Email to: cto (at) egi.eu.
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