Guidelines for UMD
From EGI Knowledge Base
The Consortia have agreed that the middleware components, tools and services, they presently support, have to evolve into a unified distribution: UMD. The support and coexistence of different implementation of the same middleware service is acceptable (and unavoidable) in the short term, but in the longer run may generate unnecessary duplication of effort which has to be avoided through a progressive specialization of the different services. The following criteria have been agreed for the components which will be included in UMD:
- Interoperability
- services included in the UMD release should be fully interoperable with all other UMD implementations adopted in the EGI Grid infrastructure.
- Completeness
- the set of available components and tools included in UMD once adopted by any NGI should allow the national infrastructure to be operated in a fully self-functional and autonomous way and at the same time completely integrated with the rest of the pan-European EGI infrastructure. The Grid services included in UMD should address the needs of all current VOs and a process should be in place to allow them to evolve according to new scientific communities requirements.
- Scalability
- available services should allow the management of resources and services in an e-Infrastructure which must satisfy scientific user communities ranging in size from a few to thousands of researchers. Different service implementations should be included to take into account both the need of simplicity for small user communities and scalability for the largest ones. In addition the services should be able to face the expected growth in scale (in terms of users, services and sites operated) over a short time period.
- Simplicity
- UMD should contain tools to download the appropriate services, to provide assistance during their configuration, and to perform as much automatic set up as possible.
- Extensibility
- UMD must provide interfaces (and “hooks”) that allow independent development (by any interested party) of higher level and additional services that will create a software pool from which further UMD innovation will be drawn. Gateways to the other (EU and non-EU like Globus) grid systems and components will be one example of services built on the extensibility APIs.
