Geneva, 20 January 2006. The kick-off meeting for a new project called ETICS (eInfrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software) is being held at CERN¹ today. The goal of this project, which is coordinated by CERN and funded partially by the European Commission, is to improve the quality of Grid and distributed software by offering a practical quality assurance process to software projects, based on a build and test service. This is a first of its kind in Grid computing.

Geneva, 20 January 2006. The kick-off meeting for a new project called ETICS (eInfrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software) is being held at CERN¹ today. The goal of this project, which is coordinated by CERN and funded partially by the European Commission, is to improve the quality of Grid and distributed software by offering a practical quality assurance process to software projects, based on a build and test service. This is a first of its kind in Grid computing.

In the short term, the ETICS project will offer a build and test service via a secure web interface and command line tools. In the medium term, distributed testing will be added, as well as a secure repository of components built by the ETICS service on a variety of platforms, with well known and controlled external dependencies. The longer term goal of ETICS is to propose a certification process for Grid and distributed software (for example middleware, components, services and user level applications). The goal of this certification process is to promote practical quality assurance for Grid and distributed software, and to provide a quantitative measure of the quality level of software.

The quality assurance process offered by ETICS will help users developing the next generation of Grid software. In particular, ETICS will help projects developing a clear set of well behaved and high quality software components, services, plug-ins and applications. Once the certification process is in place, ETICS aims to ensure that it becomes a globally recognised statement of quality for Grid and distributed software. This process should also contribute to improving interoperability between Grid and distributed software stacks.

The ETICS Service will build on cutting edge technologies, such as the NMI and Condor Grid middleware, the gLite build system (Grid middleware from EGEE, the European Grid flagship project led by CERN, which is supporting the world’s largest multi-science Grid infrastructure), as well as gLite services and components.

The ETICS consortium consists of CERN (coordinator), INFN, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A, 4D Soft Ltd. and the University of Wisconsin/Madison. All partners are involved in European and international e-Infrastructure research projects, such as EGEE, DILIGENT, SEE-GRID, etc. CERN is leading worldwide efforts to deploy a Grid to cope with the huge amounts of data, some 15 million Gigabytes annually, which will be generated by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project, scheduled to start operation in 2007. The two year ETICS project has received €1.4 million funding from the EC’s Information Society and Media Directorate, under the 6th Framework Programme.

Note to Editors:

1. For more information about the ETICS project, visit http://eu-etics.org, or contact etics-news@cern.ch
2. For more information about CERN, visit http://www.cern.ch
3. For more information about INFN, visit http://www.infn.it
4. For more information about Engineering S.p.A, visit http://www.eng.it
5. For more information about 4D Soft Ltd , visit http://www.4dsoft.hu
6. For more information about University of Wisconsin, visit http://www.wisc.edu
7. For more information about the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project (EGEE), visit http://public.eu-egee.org. ETICS is an ‘EGEE Related Project’
8. For more information about gLite, visit http://www.glite.org
9. For more information about the NMI project, visit http://www.nsf-middleware.org
10. For more information about the Condor project, visit http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor
11. For more information about the DILIGENT project, visit http://www.diligentproject.org
12. For more information about the SEE-GRID project, visit http://www.see-grid.org

¹ CERN,  the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.