1Defence, Space & Environment

Division

Delivery of industrial-strength Grid middleware: establishing an

effective European approach

EU WorkshopBrussels 21 January 2004

DATAMAT Contribution

Federico Rossi – Stefano Beco

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federico.rossi@datamat.itfederico.rossi@datamat.it EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004

Rationale for DATAMAT commitment in Grid

The traditional focus of DATAMATDATAMAT, an Italian company with over 16001600 people developing ICT solutionsICT solutions for several markets, is on innovationinnovation, 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 knowledgeknowledge of the technology, to understand the potential business returnbusiness return in terms of application and services deployment, also by applying technology transfertechnology 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 industrialindustrial viewpoint, it is now important to make new initiatives more focused, in order to achieve stabilitystability and continuitycontinuity, the two main factors to actually bridgebridge research and industry for a possible commercial commercial exploitationexploitation of the Grid.

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federico.rossi@datamat.itfederico.rossi@datamat.it EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004

A pan-European Grid infrastructure deployment

The relationship with public sector researchpublic sector research is fundamental here to deploydeploy and operateoperate a Europe-wide reliable Grid Infrastructure that can also be available to Industry.

This will enhance confidenceconfidence 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 EGEEEGEE, 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.

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federico.rossi@datamat.itfederico.rossi@datamat.it EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004

A European OMII-like action on middleware

On the middleware it is mandatory to set up robustrobust and standardstandard basic building blocks, to be widely used by those who want to play the roles of GASP and GSP, i.e. an Open MiddlewareOpen Middleware, on which to start building value-added services to make profitprofit out of technologytechnology.

To reach such achievement needs a long-lasting initiativelong-lasting initiative, not just bound to a single (or a series of) project(s), nor to FP6. This must be guaranteed at EuropeanEuropean 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 Open Middleware Initiative Institute for EuropeEurope (also ref. to recommendations from first Workshop on EU eInfrastructures initiative).

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federico.rossi@datamat.itfederico.rossi@datamat.it EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004

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 enhanceenhance all technological aspects relevant to business, such as:

SecuritySecurity, Quality of ServiceQuality of Service, Service Level Agreement, Trustworthiness over the Grid, AccountingAccounting policies...

plus Middleware CertificationCertification (as a result of an industrial level

engineeringengineering process)

In few words, to support a next generationnext generation of Grid technology to move the focus from Science to Business.

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federico.rossi@datamat.itfederico.rossi@datamat.it EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: EU Workshop: “Delivery of industrial strength Grid middleware: establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004establishing an effective EU approach” - Brussels 21/01/2004

A new generation of Grid-enabled applications

The initiatives on application side shall: Ease the diffusiondiffusion of a Grid culture, at

most through a generalised test-bedtest-bed policy aimed at demonstrating in concrete terms the advantages of using it

Grid-enableGrid-enable classes of applications by developing suitable tool kitstool kits and/or porting existing problem-solving problem-solving environmentenvironment on Grid contexts

StandardiseStandardise as much as possible the accessaccess to Grid services and resources, to strongly reducereduce the dependency on specific middleware implementation and/or specific infrastructure.