Subject: Report from Cyprus From: Maria Alandes Pradillo Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 01:39:33 +0200 To: Maria Dimou Hi Maria, This is the summary from Cyprus: There were a series of presentations and open discussions mainly about how the middleware will be released and certified. The ones that I found more relevant were: UMD and EGI, by Oliver Keeble - He explained how UMD and EGI will interact. EGI will have money for middleware maintenance. Middleware development will be financed by other means (national activities, EU projects, ...). Basically what it's explained here https://web.eu-egi.eu/knowledge/index.php/Image:EGISoftDev9_5.pdf - In EGI there will be a Middleware unit interacting with UMD, where there will be something similar to the current EMT called Middleware Coordination Board. - Testing will be done in the so called "product teams" which are developing the services that are part of UMD. The Integration of these services will be done at consortium level. UMD, by Francesco Giacomini - Mainly summarising http://knowledge.eu-egi.eu/knowledge/index.php/UMD EGEE III year, by Steven Newhouse - He presented how the 3rd year of the EGEE project will be. - NGIs should start relying on national funding. - Operation of the infrastructure should be moved to the NGIs. - Before the final transition to EGI we will try not to release new middleware, to facilitate the work of NGIs. Only critical issues. Product teams should be already responsible for the releases and should take this into account. Open discussion - This was mainly focused on how the middleware would be released and tested. Client and service releases? Basic testbed with all mw components in each product team? How the mw will be released now? Source rpms? Sdk? User Support, by Diana Bosio - GGUS tickets should be treated by each product team. - Who will do 1st level support? There's a gap on this. - There's no transition plan defined. As a summary, the meeting show that there are still a lot of open issues. People interested in the transition to EGI and UMD should follow up closely in the next weeks since reports and documents are being produced by the people behind all this, and I'm sure more information will be available to clarify these open issues. As far as User Support is concerned, the presentation made by Diana brought awareness on certain gaps and I hope this will be taken into account. Nothing was decided there but since all the middleware developers were there, there was a lot of discussion on how the release process would work when we finally move to product teams. This of course included User support and Configuration, which are topics that are less discussed so far. I guess the EGEE conference in September will be a good place to see where we will be by then in the transition towards EGI and UMD.