Four middleware providers now work as one

This week, the EMI middleware, codenamed ‘Kebnekaise’ will be released.

The new Kebnekaise middleware derives from the name of a mountain in the home country of one of EMI’s partner organizations, Sweden. Image courtesy Alexandre Buisse, Wikimedia Commons.

"It brings under one distribution the four major middleware providers in Europe - ARC, gLite, UNICORE and dCache," Alberto Di Meglio, EMI’s project director and based at CERN in Switzerland, said.

"It provides new functionality, better compatibility with standard Linux guidelines, an almost complete set of source RPMS, updated documentation and more."

The challenge for EMI and these providers is to work on the long term sustainability of the middleware as an essential tool for European research. Sustainability can only come if important aspects of simplification, standardization and quality are addressed in a collaborative way.

EMI’s Kebnekaise is the first step towards creating a unified distribution. The aim is for Kebnekaise and future releases of EMI to provide a more usable, reliable and accessible solution for scientific researchers in Europe and beyond.

This first release was named Kebnekaise after the tallest mountain in Sweden. There are two more peaks on the horizon: EMI Matterhorn – named after one of the tallest mountains in the Alps – and EMI Monte Bianco - the tallest mountain in Western Europe – will be launched in 2012 and 2013 respectively.