Conference xxx - August 2003 Fabrizio Gagliardi EDG Project Leader and EGEE designated Project Director Position paper Delivery of industrial-strength Grid middleware: establishing an effective European approach 21 January Brussels

Grid Industrial Middleware -21 January Brussels - 2 Grid software engineering, production and commercialisation process I Accepted de-facto international standards Competitive and collaborative international distributed software development environment Accepted international authority for benchmarking, certification, repository and distribution (OMII Institute?) Dedicated pilot user community involved in all phases of the software development cycle: user requirements, deployment, certification and testing Converting pilot project research software to production quality requires different skills and much more effort than the initial implementation effort: Projects tasked to create production-level gridware should be funded at appropriate level Industrial partners may in some cases provide part of the human resources, but at the current early stage of gridware, the product should remain open source Powerful production quality infrastructure needs to be deployed and supported with high quality standards

Grid Industrial Middleware -21 January Brussels - 3 Grid software engineering, production and commercialisation process II It is important that the Grid infrastructure be capable to offer access to resources (data collections, instruments, specialized or very powerful computers) not obtainable from a conventional computer centre Training and outreach activities important (Grid applications still require specific skills and knowledge) Basic middleware and tool kits must remain as much as possible available with open source licenses which while preserving the IPR of the contributors should allow a wide and free distribution to the largest world wide development community

Grid Industrial Middleware -21 January Brussels - 4 Grid software engineering, production and commercialisation process III Networking infrastructure must become Grid aware and start to include higher level of services now provided by Grid middleware tool kits Previous results from Grid projects developed by large and demanding big research communities are important The various solutions developed to address these specific problems should be leveraged in the new FP6 being deployed Grid infrastructure

Grid Industrial Middleware -21 January Brussels - 5 The International Collaboration context Bilateral collaboration easier to establish (i.e. US-UK for OGSA/DAI, US-INFN for Condor, etc.) should continue Important to have large infrastructure projects (such as EGEE) to integrate these efforts into a larger and comprehensive system. Many standardization bodies exist (i.e. GGF, IETF, W3C, OASIS...), their respective roles relative to Grid standards will become clearer as the Grid technology will evolve towards maturity, but in any case the resulting standards will facilitate the evolution of a global grid infrastructure. The major objective of EC-NSF collaboration should be to make attractive for middleware developers in the US and in the EU to cooperate rather than compete: common calls for development and deployment of common Grid infrastructures. reasonable part of the budget of new proposed projects both in the US and in the EU should be devoted to international collaboration and this should be considered as an advantage in the evaluation of the project proposals political will by both sides to collaborate rather than compete series of meetings/workshops alternatively held in the two regions important to start early in 2004 and continue with possibly a six month frequency to be effective still in FP6 some preparatory steps could be made in the context of the EU-ERA infrastructure reflection group.

Grid Industrial Middleware -21 January Brussels - 6 Recommended set of actions for an EU Action Plan Summary of recommendation: Consider develop an international Grid development and deployment framework (not limited to US) Consider the support of a EU based OMII (Open Middleware International Institute) Develop a long term strategy and support framework for an international production quality Grid infrastructure (EGEE and follow on) Understand how industry could participate in the above