Middleware for the next generation Grid infrastructure

The aim of the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe) project is to create a reliable and dependable European Grid infrastructure for e-Science. The objective of the EGEE Middleware Re-engineering and Integration Research Activity is to provide robust middleware components, deployable on several platforms and operating systems, corresponding to the core Grid services for resource access, data management, information collection, authentication & authorization, resource matchmaking and brokering, and monitoring and accounting. For achieving this objective, we developed an architecture and design of the next generation Grid middleware leveraging experiences and existing components essentially from AliEn, EDG, and VDT. The architecture follows the service breakdown developed by the LCG ARDA group. Our strategy is to do as little original development as possible but rather re-engineer and harden existing Grid services. The evolution of these middleware components towards a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) adopting existing standards (and following emerging ones) as much as possible is another major goal of our activity.