Speaker
Description
Collaboration on software development and innovation is fundamental to progress further in the evolution of research infrastructures.
MeDia aims to provide a forum for coordinating innovation and development of middleware services across the research infrastructures based on its members’ interests and priorities. Participation to the activities is voluntary and bottom-up. It relies on an active sharing of information, proposals and ideas from members to other members. MeDIA focuses on practical aspects of designing and implementing services for enabling distributed computing and data eScience infrastructures. It includes discussions on existing or future technologies that allows developers to provide efficient services, from traditional batch and grid systems to the emerging cloud systems and beyond.
The typical functional domains MeDIA wants to work on are security services, information systems, data and compute services providing the shared core layer which eInfrastructures are built upon.
The main commitment and interest of MeDIA are the academic and scientific research infrastructures. However, technology sharing and adoption with industrial members are also welcome.
MeDIA should be complementary to existing forums like OGF and provide practical implementations and realistic feedback for recognized and agreed standards and specification in the distributed computing and data management.
Impact
MeDIA will allow the constructive collaboration formed within EMI to continue and become more open and flexible. It will allow developers and infrastructure admins to share ideas and work on common interests with the goal of accelerating the implementation of common functionality and efficient community platforms.
Summary
The EMI project will end its operations in April 2013. However, the need to keep the technical collaboration active among the partners and extend it to additional middleware providers is vitally important. EMI is establishing a open collaboration, tentatively named "Middleware Development and Innovation Alliance" (MeDIA), to discuss shared interests, preserve and grow the existing network of contacts, provide coordination of common activities and act as a single entry point for relations with users and infrastructures. Software developers/providers should attend this session - the status of the initiative will be briefed and discussions will cover its proposed structure and goals.
