A-WARE

An easy Way to Access GRID REsources

This project has been successfully finished.

The A-WARE project strategic objective was to develop a stable, supported, commercially exploitable, high quality technology named EU-1 able to give easy access to Grid resources. A-WARE primarily targeted the Grid Foundations topic of the above-mentioned strategic objective.

The project is based on the EnginFrame Grid portal experience and on UNICORE 6.0 technologies; EnginFrame is a framework developed by NICE, this tool is adopted by a wide number of important companies worldwide; EnginFrame is the base of the GENIUS portal adopted by EGEE; UNICORE 6.0 is the outcome of several projects, and represents one of the most mature European middleware available today.

The guiding principle of the project was to exploit and leverage the maturity of the UNICORE 6.0 software components, developing a technology able to easily widen the adoption of Grid technology via a web thin-client approach based on user-friendly interfaces, hiding the complexity of the underlying Grid middleware to occasional as well as frequent users. To facilitate the exploitation, particular care was put on simplifying the deployment of the Grid under typical industrial scenarios, such as Intranet security, single-sign-on systems, etc. Finally, another guiding principle of the project was both to adopt and influence standards in all key project areas.

The design phase addressed the coupling between UNICORE 6.0 and a generic open source portal technology; the framework was designed addressing the full service / job-flow life-cycle (design, submission, validation, execution, monitoring, data management and virtualisation), including industry-focused AAA, SLAs, QoS and presentation issues; at the same time it guaranteed interoperability with the most important available Grid middleware, including those currently under development in other FP6 projects and those relevant to the industrial community. In the implementation phase software components was developed to address the functional requirements and the interoperability targets. The project deliverables were validated in the computational fluid dynamics industrial domain, including a test-bed built according to mainstream industrial requirements. The A-WARE project cooperated with other European projects, soliciting their requirements to influence the software development process, especially for what concerns interoperability issues. Exploitation, mainly in terms of support and commercialisation of a re-engineered derivative product, was guaranteed by NICE using the network of European Value Added Resellers (VAR) that already collaborates for the EnginFrame product. To project result exploitation purposes, VAR represented a well tuned structure for commercialisation.

The A-WARE project was beneficial for public organisation and private companies because it provided a completely integrated, standard-compliant user-centric solution. The technology developed by the A-WARE project fills the gap existing between middleware and portals, offering a set of user-oriented services designed to highlight processes in terms of complex workflows by mean of and user-friendly interfaces; in this manner the technology helps the users in their way of perceiving the GRID as something beneficial, transparent and seamless; having a solution in their hands, the users are not having to spend effort on technical or technological issues but focus attention on their own real problems.

The A-WARE Consortium contained five partners from four European countries (Italy, Germany, UK, France):
Consorzio Interuniversitario (CINECA), Italy (Coordinator)
Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany
Fujitsu Laboratory of Europe, UK
NICE s.r.l. (NICE), Italy
AIRBUS, France

The project was funded by the European Union (EU) under contract number IST-05-034545. The grant period is 01.06.2006 until 31.05.2008.

More information: A-WARE project website