On 1 January 2006, an EU-funded project was launched that will improve the coherence and quality of Grid software. The e-Infrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software project (ETICS) will integrate existing procedures, tools and resources to create a facility where distributed research projects can integrate their code, libraries and applications; validate the code against standard guidelines; run extensive automated tests and benchmarks; produce reports; and improve the overall quality and interoperability of the software.
Scientific software today is often the product of large distributed collaborations and increasingly uses new technologies like the Grid to solve complex, computer-intensive problems. Owing to a large variety of available tools, programming languages, platforms and so on, these software stacks risk suffering from a lack of coherence and quality. Limited timescales, manpower and funding often prohibit the creation of a dedicated build and test infrastructure for each new project.
ETICS will provide such a capability for software configuration, integration, testing and benchmarking for the scientific community, including software engineering tools and support infrastructures developed by other projects (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE [EGEE], the LHC Computing Grid, the NSF Middleware Initiative) and open-source or industrial entities. To promote international collaboration and facilitate interoperability of analysis already at early stages of development and implementation, ETICS will collect, organize and publish middleware and application configuration information as well as common quality guidelines and principles.
The ETICS project is a spin-off from EGEE. That project's Grid middleware, gLite, is based on middleware from many projects worldwide and inherits code from various sources and languages (see CERN Courier September 2005 p21). EGEE's software quality assurance has developed ways to monitor code development and adherence to standards. ETICS will make these available to developers of middleware and application software worldwide, as well as a dedicated testing infrastructure.
Author:
Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel