Project Vision and Mission. The European Middleware Initiative is a close collaboration of the three major middleware providers, ARC, gLite and UNICORE, and other software providers. It will deliver a consolidated set of middleware components for deployment in EGI (as part of the Unified Middleware Distribution or UMD), PRACE and other DCIs, extend the interoperability and integration between grids and other computing infrastructures, strengthen the reliability and manageability of the services and establish a sustainable model to support, harmonise and evolve the middleware, ensuring it responds effectively to the requirements of the scientific communities relying on it. European scientific research has benefited in the past several years from the increasing availability of computing and data infrastructures that have provided unprecedented capabilities for large scale distributed scientific initiatives. A number of major projects and endeavours, like EGEE, DEISA, WLCG, NDGF, OSG, See-Grid, BalticGrid and others, have been established within Europe and internationally to share the ever growing amount of computational and storage resources. This collaborative effort has involved hundreds of participating research organizations, academic institutes and commercial companies. The major outcome is a number of active production infrastructures providing services to many research communities, such as High Energy Physics, Life Sciences, Material Science, Astronomy, Computational Chemistry, Environmental Science, Humanities and more. At the core of these rich infrastructural facilities lies the grid middleware, a set of High Throughput Computing (HTC) and High Performance Computing (HPC) software services and components that enable the users to access the distributed computing and data resources, execute jobs, collect results and share information. Middleware like gLite from the EGEE project, ARC from the NorduGrid Collaboration, UNICORE, VDT, Globus and other specific services for computing and data management have allowed thousands of scientific researchers to access grid- enabled resources and produce scientific results. After the necessary initial period of research and consolidation that took place in the past 6 to 8 years, the growing usage of distributed computing and data resources by scientific communities and individual researchers requires now the stabilization of the computing infrastructures and a simplification and standardization in the use of the associated software tools. It...
