Delivery of industrial-strength Grid middleware: establishing an effective European approach

1. Delivery of industrial-strength Grid middleware: establishing an effective European approach EU Workshop Brussels 21 January 2004 DATAMAT ContributionFederico Rossi – Stefano Beco Defence, Space & EnvironmentDivision

2. Rationale for DATAMAT commitment in Grid SpaceGRID • The traditional focus of DATAMAT, an Italian company with over 1600 people developing ICT solutions for several markets, is on innovation, with a long record of international R&D projects followed by successful commercial exploitation. • Grid is one of the most promising novelties for the ICT market, representing a fundamental gap in how computing is perceived and used. • To acquire a specific knowledge of the technology, to understand the potential business return in terms of application and services deployment, also by applying technology transfer across our reference markets, DATAMAT decided in 2000 to participate in the first large Grid Project in Europe – EU-DataGrid – and in the following years to other outstanding initiatives: • From an industrial viewpoint, it is now important to make new initiatives more focused, in order to achieve stability and continuity, the two main factors to actually bridge research and industry for a possible commercial exploitation of the Grid. Defence, Space & EnvironmentDivision

3. A pan-European Grid infrastructure deployment • The relationship with public sector research is fundamental here to deploy and operate a Europe-wide reliable Grid Infrastructure that can also be available to Industry. • This will enhance confidence in Grid from those end-user industries that have problems suitable to be solved with the help of Grid, but that still do not have enough evidence that such technology could give benefits on a large scale and in an industrial arena. • As the first important step towards this, we see an initiative like EGEE, which aims at setting up a production-quality infrastructure for (initially) research: such effort should not stop with the end of the project, but should also be supported as a long-lasting initiative. Defence, Space & EnvironmentDivision

4. A European OMII-like action on middleware • On the middleware it is mandatory to set up robust and standard basic building blocks, to be widely used by those who want to play the roles of GASP and GSP, i.e. an Open Middleware, on which to start building value-added services to make profit out of technology. • To reach such achievement needs a long-lasting initiative, not just bound to a single (or a series of) project(s), nor to FP6. This must be guaranteed at European level, taking into account and harmonising on-going efforts at national level. • Therefore, we strongly support the idea of an Open Middleware Initiative Institute for Europe (also ref. to recommendations from first Workshop on EU eInfrastructures initiative). Defence, Space & EnvironmentDivision

5. A technological convergence of middlewareon Grid for business • On the other hand, it is compulsory that middleware converges on solid business models to be exploited on Grid Infrastructures. • This means supporting the efforts required to enhance all technological aspects relevant to business, such as: • Security, • Quality of Service, • Service Level Agreement, • Trustworthiness over the Grid, • Accounting policies... • plus • Middleware Certification (as a result of an industrial level engineering process) • In few words, to support a next generation of Grid technology to move the focus from Science to Business. Defence, Space & EnvironmentDivision

6. A new generation of Grid-enabled applications • The initiatives on application side shall: • Ease the diffusion of a Grid culture, at most through a generalised test-bed policy aimed at demonstrating in concrete terms the advantages of using it • Grid-enable classes of applications by developing suitable tool kits and/or porting existing problem-solving environment on Grid contexts • Standardise as much as possible the access to Grid services and resources, to strongly reduce the dependency on specific middleware implementation and/or specific infrastructure. Defence, Space & EnvironmentDivision