12–16 Apr 2010
Uppsala University
Europe/Stockholm timezone

ETICS a success story from research to production

15 Apr 2010, 10:00
20m
Room IV (Uppsala University)

Room IV

Uppsala University

Oral Support services and tools for user communities DCI programming

Speaker

isabel matranga (Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA and ETICS2 team member)

Description

ETICS is a software build, test and quality certification system which, after four years of development activities and use by the research environment, is now mature to start its way into the commercial software development environment. The experimentation of the use of ETICS also in the commercial environment was part of the challenge since the very beginning. This experimentation has now become a reality thanks also to the project commercial partners like Engineering which is going to offer ETICS as a service to the project managers from its production units.

Impact

During the presentation Engineering team will present experiences and results from the above described experimentation. Engineering can be considered the right example of adopter of ETICS in a context of software production as it is a large company with 7000 people essentially working on software development projects. It runs about 100 development projects per year, from small ones (3months - few developers) to large ones (spanning over several years - up to 70 developers - several development units). Engineering is also running a data centre which currently serves more than one hundred customers with an average of three thousand users. Moreover the company is certified ISO 9001 and CMMI lv 3 and since 1996 has devoted resources to improve the quality of its results and internal processes. Engineering aims at fully exploiting the ETICS system within the company and for this reason it will support the use of the ETICS service after the end of the ETICS 2 project (the activity will only partially be supported by the ETICS 2 EU co-funding) for the D4Science II development team, the Easy-Rider project (a national research project) and two of its commercial projects.

Detailed analysis

gLite and gCube, and more recently Unicore have exploited the ETICS services and contributed to their improvement. On the 28th February 2010 the ETICS 2 project will end and ETICS services - per se - will no longer be provided by the ETICS 2 Consortium (the adoption of ETICS has been considered in several project proposals e.g EMI, SGI). The ETICS open source SW (Apache 2.0 license) will be hosted on a public forge managed on a voluntary bases by members of the ETICS 2 consortium. In the view of a fully exploitable ETICS system, Engineering has started an experimentation by using ETICS in commercial projects aiming at creating higher consensus around the ETICS service and promoting it throughout the company to all its Project Managers. This activity will also allow the identification of further improvements in terms of performance and usability of the entire system, as well as the usage patterns and operational costs of running such service. The ongoing experimentation aims at installing ETICS at Engineering premises on a Virtual infrastructure, and will include the recent developments of ETICS submission engine towards the Amazon Web Services to allow higher capabilities on demand

Conclusions and Future Work

The success of the ETICS experimentation within Engineering company will mean also a success for the innovation cycle by witnessing the adoption of research results in the more pragmatic commercial domain justifying investments. According to the results of the experimentation (in terms of percentage of adoption within the company) Engineering will analyse the opportunity of operating the ETICS service from its data centre. In the future, the same service may be opened to external users, mainly SMEs cooperating with Engineering or Research Projects in which Engineering is involved.

URL for further information www.eng.it; www.eticsproject.eu ; cloud.eng.it (under construction)
Keywords Build, Test, Software quality certification, Cloud services, commercial exploitation

Primary author

isabel matranga (Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA and ETICS2 team member)

Co-author

andrea manieri (Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA)

Presentation materials