OMII-Europe

Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe

This project has been successfully finished.

The Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe (OMII-Europe) had been established to provide key software components for building e-Infrastructures within the European Research Area (ERA).

The initial focus for OMII-Europe was to facilitate the development and porting of a common set of application level services to a number of major Grid software distributions, and further to develop tighter interoperability between different Grid distributions. This provided greater application level portability and thus simplified the use of Grids, especially when those Grids were built on heterogeneous infrastructures. Many of the major Grid software providers such as EGEE, UNICORE, Globus and CROWNGrid had been working with OMII-Europe to achieve these goals in a standardscompliant and open-source manner.

OMII-Europe developed and maintained a repository of quality-assured Grid services that have been reengineered and sourced from existing open source repositories. Central to OMII-Europe was Quality Assurance. All OMII-Europe-endorsed software components will undergo rigorous testing following a quality assurance methodology published by OMII-Europe.

OMII-Europe positioned itself as an impartial broker for potential users of key middleware platforms providing impartial, unbiased advice and services. In line with this, OMII-Europe initiated development of a Grid benchmarking methodology and published results on a number of major Grid distributions. This benchmark suite was made available to the community and OMII-Europe encouraged community benchmark contributions.

The OMII-Europe Consortium contains 16 partners from seven countries (UK, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Poland, USA, China):
University of Southampton, UK (Coordinator)
Fujitsu Laboratory of Europe, UK
Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany
Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Italy
Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Poland
University of Edinburgh, UK
The University of Chicago, Argonne Laboratory, USA
The University of Illinois, NCSA, USA
The University of Southern California, USA
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Beihang University, China
Institute of Computing Technology, China
The Computer Network Information Centre, China
Tsinghua University, China

The project was funded by the European Union (EU) under contract number INFSO-RI-031844. The grant period is 01.05.2006 until 30.04.2008.

More information: OMII-Europe project website