New award for OMII-Europe to develop Grid technology

An award made this month to the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will help shape the future of e-Science.

ECS has yet again shown its leadership in the area of middleware engineering with the award of a €4.8 million European Union contract to establish the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe (OMII-Europe). This award follows the recent success of ECS in securing an additional £5.6 million for the national Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute-UK (OMII-UK).

The OMII-Europe award is of particular significance as the University of Southampton is the co-ordinating partner within a 16-partner project involving the major European, American and Chinese institutes involved in Grid middleware development.

‘This project is also regarded within the European Union as a core infrastructure project that will shape the way e-Science is done within Europe for years to come,’ said Professor Peter Henderson, who is leading this activity.

OMII-Europe will provide key software components for building e-Infrastructures within the European Research Area (ERA). The initial focus for OMII-Europe is to facilitate the development and porting of a common set of application level services to a number of major Grid software distributions, and to develop tighter interoperability between those distributions.

Dr Alistair Dunlop, who has been instrumental in forging this collaboration, commented: ‘By bringing together many of the major Grid software providers to harmonize their efforts we will achieve Grid software that is more accessible and easier to use by application scientists.

‘This is a major international initiative that will play a significant part in the overall global effort to take forward the state of the art in Grid technology.’