SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond

EMI - <strong>European</strong> Middleware Initiative
General overview and field of application
As being primarily a ‘research middleware provider’, <strong>European</strong> Middleware Intiative (EMI)
use cases, in the context of e-infrastructures, are driven by ‘complex distributed highlevel
scientific workflows’ that partly span over different types of e-Infrastructures.
These require the transparent access to different types of heterogeneous computational
resources (i.e. HPC and HTC) as well as performing storage management and necessary
data transfers between resources. Here different computational paradigms such as
HPC and HTC are needed in order to support common scientific community accepted
different low-level application programming models (i.e. OpenMP, MPI vs. task farming).
This in turn points to requirements for common interfaces to computing resources,
storage management, and the use of commonly agreed interfaces for data transfer
adopted by middleware services that provide access to such resources. Related to this are
challenging security requirements such as enabling single-sign on across e-Infrastructure
boundaries or even performing work on behalf of another identity than the initial
middleware user itself (i.e. delegation of rights). Although many security models (PKI,
SLC-services, OpenID, etc.) and interfaces/standards (X.509, SAML, etc.) exist, they
have been not consistently adopted across technology providers. More recently, cloud
computing is emerging using virtualization technologies that form a dynamic kind of ‘ondemand
e-Infrastructure’. EMI explores solutions to enable middleware services to take
advantage of such emerging virtualized infrastructures. In this context, we consider two
options. EMI services that are part of virtual machine appliances and the seamless access
to existing cloud infrastructures from already established and broadly used middleware
services/clients.
CloudScape III - Taking <strong>European</strong> Cloud Infrastructure Forward
The importance of interoperability
The requirement for interoperability between existing middleware services that are
deployed as part of virtual appliances is relatively well supported by available standards
in the field that EMI is commonly adopting during the course of the project (i.e. compute,
data, information, security area, etc.). However, end-users typically require interoperability
to take advantage of middleware services with unique capabilities that specifically offer
access to HPC, HTC, or storage resources across all different kinds of e-Infrastructures
(e.g. PRACE, EGI, clouds). While HPC-based clouds are rather rare, we mostly experience
interoperability requirements for middleware to use it seamlessly with already existing
cloud-based infrastructures (and their access and management interfaces) offering HTC
resources and dynamic storage capabilities. EMI will work towards the interoperability
with implementations providing emerging standards-based interfaces to existing cloud
infrastructures, with a particular focus on the access of computing and data resources.
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