The different flavors
A middleware is computer software that connects software components or applications. The software consists of a set of enabling services that allow multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact across a network. This technology evolved to provide for interoperability in support of the integration for many different architectures, which are used most often to support and simplify a complex distributed applications integrations.
Various middleware projects have been developed with the aim to allow diverse scientific and commercial projects to harness a particular associated grid, or with the purpose of setting up new grids flavors which provide different facilities.
In fact, the middleware can be seen as a software layer between the hardware and the applications. On top of this middleware, a number of technical areas have to be considered, and these may or may not be middleware independent.
Here you have a list of different implementations that have been carried out.
Various Grid Infrastructure projects (usually building around their own favorite middleware) have created large production grid infrastructures to bring reliables and scalable computing resources to research communities as well as commercial projects.
| Name | Region | Start | End |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute Europe (OMII-Europe) | Europe | May 2006 | May 2008 |
| Enabling Grids for E-sciencE I (EGEE) | Europe | March 2004 | March 2006 |
| Enabling Grids for E-sciencE II (EGEE II) | Europe | April 2006 | April 2008 |
| Enabling Grids for E-sciencE III (EGEE III) | Europe | May 2008 | April 2010 |
| D4Science (DIstributed colLaboratories Infrastructure on Grid ENabled Technology 4 Science) | Europe and Asia and the Pacific | January 2008 | December 2009 |
| E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America (EELA-2) | Europe and Latin America | April 2008 | March 2010 |
| E-Infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America (EELA) | Europe and Latin America | January 2006 | December 2008 |
| Business Experiments in GRID (BEinGRID) | Europe | June 2006 | November 2009 |
| BREIN | Europe | September 2006 | August 2009 |
| KnowARC | Europe | June 2006 | August 2009 |
| Nordic Data Grid Facility | Scandinavia and Finland | June 2006 | December 2010 |
| DataTAG | Europe and North America | January 2001 | January 2003 |
| European DataGrid (EDG) | Europe | March 2001 | March 2004 |
| BalticGrid | Europe (Baltic States) | November 2005 | April 2008 |
| EUFORIA (EU Fusion fOR Iter Applications) | Europe | January 2008 | December 2010 |
| World Community Grid | Global | November 2004 | unknown |
| XtreemOS | Europe | June 2006 | June 2010 |
| GridEcon | Europe | June 2006 | Arpil 2009 |