Speaker
URL
http://www.eu-emi.eu/
Overview (For the conference guide)
The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a close collaboration of four major European technology provides: ARC, gLite, UNICORE and dCache. Its main objective is the delivery of a consolidated and harmonized set of components for deployment in EGI, PRACE and other DCIs production environments.
This presentation will give an overview of the status of EMI products with a special focus on the support and maintenance activities performance during the first year after the EMI 1 Kebnekaise release.
The status of the EMI 2 Matterhorn, scheduled for release at the end of April, 2012, will also be presented, highlighting new features provided in EMI components and the updates of the EMI certification and release processes.
Description of the Work
Software Maintenance in EMI consists in the coordination of the continuous activities, implemented by EMI Product Teams (PTs), aimed at fixing problems found in middleware components developed within the project and included in an EMI distribution, preserving at the same time their stability in terms of interface and behavior, so that higher-level frameworks and applications can rely on them.
The natural output of the maintenance activity is the release of the updated components in production following the EMI updates release process. This presentation will describe in detail the EMI maintenance, certification and release processes and will give an overview of the EMI products updates released in the first year after the EMI 1 Kebnekaise release.
The EMI beta and acceptance testing processes will also be presented. These processes allow external interested parties to evaluate EMI products during earlier phases of development and give feedback to EMI. The experience gathered in these first months show that the early adoption of EMI products provides improved quality of the released products and better adherence to client requirements.
Conclusions
This presentation will give an overview of the status of EMI products with a special focus on the support and maintenance activities performance during the first year after the EMI 1 Kebnekaise release. EMI 2 Matterhorn will also be presented highlighting the new features and components provided and discussing deployment strategies for the existing production infrastructures.
Impact
The release and certification process that will lead to the EMI 2 Matterhorn release will also be presented. The process is organized around four release-candidate cycles in a period of four months. On each cycle, a more stringent set of quality checks is applied to the EMI release candidate products. Integration is performed at the build level using the ETICS continuuos build infrastructure targeting 3 platforms (SL5, SL6 and Debian6). The artefacts are then deployed on the EMI testbed for verification and intercomponent testing. The EMI Quality Control team validates the quality of the documentation and assesses that all the required tests have been run during the ceritfication process.
