OMII-Europe

OMII-Europe is short for the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe. It is a project that is being funded by the European Union (Sixth Framework Programme) to produce high-quality, interoperable Grid components. This would mean, for example, that a user can submit the identical job to any basic job execution service regardless of the Grid middleware platform it is running on.

In the short term, this will help other projects that rely on different platforms and make Grid services more accessible to researchers. In the long term, the work of OMII-Europe contributes to the ongoing global efforts to forward the state-of-the-art of Grid technology.

OMII-Europe aims to bring together key technologies from across Europe (and elsewhere) and re-engineer them to work across the main Grid platforms. The three main goals of the project are:

* Interoperability
* Quality assurance
* Become an impartial broker, providing unbiased information about grid components and platforms

Grid components and platforms

OMII-Europe is focusing on three major platforms: gLite, UNICORE and Globus. The following components have been identified as vital for establishing Grids and are being re-engineered to interoperate across these three platforms:

* A basic job execution service (specifically BES/JSDL)
* A data integration service (specifically OGSA-DAI)
* A virtual organisation management service (specifically VOMS)
* An accounting service (specifically RUS)
* A portal capability (specifically GridSphere)

The components will be made available for download from a repository via the OMII Europe website. There will also be several training courses across Europe and in China for the users of the components.

Project partners

The project involves 16 partners from Europe, the USA and China.
* University of Southampton, UK (Coordinating partner) [http://www.soton.ac.uk]
* FLE, Fujitsu Laboratories Europe, London, UK [http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/]
* Forschungszentrum Juelich, Juelich, Germany [http://www.fz-juelich.de/portal/]
* Kungl Tekniska Högskolan, Stockholm, Sweden (KTH) [http://www.kth.se/]
* Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Rome, Italy (INFN) [http://www.infn.it/indexendef.php]
* Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Poznan, Poland [http://www.man.poznan.pl/pcss/public/main/index.html?lang=en]
* University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK [http://www.ed.ac.uk/]
* European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) [http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html]
* University of Chicago,Chicago, USA [http://www.uchicago.edu/]
* University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA [http://www.uiuc.edu]
* University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA [http://www.isi.edu]
* University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA [http://www.wisc.edu]
* Beihang University, Beihang, China [http://www.buaa.edu.cn/oldwww/main/eindex.html]
* Institute of Computing Technology, Beijing, China [http://www.ict.ac.cn/en/]
* The Computer Network Information Centre, Beijing, China [http://www.cnic.ac.cn/english/index.html]
* Tsinghua University, Tsinghua, China [http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/qhdwzyeng/index.jsp]

Project history

OMII-Europe is a 2 year project that started in May 2006.

ee also

* Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)
* Open Grid Forum (OGF)
*Globus Alliance
*UNICORE
* Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE)
* Job Submission Description Language (JSDL)
* ETICS: the "Grid quality process", providing build, test and certification tooling to OMII-Europe

External links

* [http://www.omii-europe.org OMII-Europe website]