EMI – European Middleware Initiative

The European Middleware Initiative is a collaboration of the three major middleware providers in Europe, ARC, gLite and UNICORE, and other consortia. EMI aims to deliver a consolidated set of middleware components for deployment in EGI, PRACE and other DCIs; extend the interoperability between grids and other computing infrastructures; strengthen the reliability of the services; and establish a sustainable model to maintain and evolve the middleware, fulfilling the requirements of the user communities. European scientific research has benefited recently from the increasing availability of computing and data infrastructures with unprecedented capabilities for large scale distributed initiatives. These infrastructures are largely defined by enabling middleware. After the necessary initial period of research and consolidation that has taken place in the past several years, the growing usage of these resources now requires the transformation of the computing infrastructures into a professionally managed and standardized service.