European Middleware Initiative

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.
Website	www.eu-emi.eu

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.