EU European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a large FP7 project that brings together 24 partners from Europe and outside with the goal to create a common approach to the Grid middleware and implement it in an innovative middleware stack. Its key stakeholders are the major European middlware producers: ARC, gLite and UNICORE, together with the dCache storage software developers.

Our Particle Physics division of Lund University plays one of the major roles in EMI, providing its Technical Director and an Executive Collaboration Board member. In addition, our group is one of the key contributors to the ARC middleware.

Our division takes very active part in development of Grid technologies since 2000, when it became clear that modern High Energy Physics (HEP) projects can not succeed without very substantial computational and data storage faclities. Distributed nature of HEP activities worldwide makes Grid a natural choice. Researchers from our division took part in the CERN-lead EU DataGrid (EDG) project, and in 2001 together with colleagues from other HEP groups in Nordic universities co-initiated the NorduGrid project, that transformed into an international collaboration in 2003. Further, the EU KnowARC project, where our team also provided a Technical Coordinator, became the next logical step in deveopment of the ARC middleware, particularly at the time when formal technology standards started to emerge.

The EMI team in Lund consists of four researchers: Dr. Balázs Kónya, Dr. Ulf Mjörnmark, Florido Paganelli and Dr. Oxana Smirnova. There are possibilities to carry out student projects related to Grid computing in High Energy Physics.

Our goal is to contribute to timely delivery of the new European Grid middleware, capable of meeting demands of various user groups, and specifically the ATLAS and ALICE experiments at CERN, of which our division is a member. Grid infrastructure created with our help, along with the experimental facilities, is an essential tool for making discoveries.

Contact: Dr. Oxana Smirnova