Riding to the rescue is a new project dedicated to improving the quality assurance, or QA, process for grid middleware and software. By simplifying and automating the build-and-test process using a Web interface and realistic grid test bed, ETICS, which stands for eInfrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software, will improve the overall quality of the grid.

"We aren't just producing a big QA document that will act as a doorstopper and collect dust," says CERN's Marc-Elian Bégin, leader of ETICS dissemination and training. "We're providing a service for developers, with a long-term goal of establishing a certification process for grid middleware and software."

Bégin notes that companies like Microsoft and Sun have accepted QA processes for software. If developers want Microsoft to bundle their application with its products, they have to make sure their software looks, feels and performs a certain way. But on the grid, not only are there many technologies, programming languages and operating systems, but cultures and goals may vary widely between partners and projects.

"Setting up a corporate process, where you expect everyone to behave in the same way, would be very difficult in a distributed project," adds Bégin. "We need a process flexible enough to cope with diversity."

ETICS' main customers today are the EGEE infrastructure and its gLite middleware, and the DILIGENT project, which integrates grid and digital library technologies. Demand is increasing quickly for the service, however, and a first version of the ETICS service is expected by June or July of this year.

In the ETICS model, the service would be the next step for developers after they have built new grid applications on their own machine. The service currently builds and tests software using a 150-CPU grid test bed that mimics the variety of a production grid. The project uses NSF Middleware Initiative, or NMI, technology to submit jobs to the test bed.

"The developer uses a Web interface to describe his or her application—environment, version, dependencies, and which middleware it should be tested on," explains Alberto Di Meglio, ETICS project manager. "ETICS analyzes all the parameters and creates a number of grid jobs that are submitted to the NMI layer. NMI finds a match for each of the jobs, runs the jobs, and reports back to ETICS, which relays the results to the user."

In addition to improving the quality of the grid, a certification process may also encourage fair competition between grid software and middleware providers.

"Now if you want to select a grid storage element, there are a zillion on the Web and you just have to pick one," says Bégin. "Once we've defined metrics that give real indications of the quality of software implementations, we can make things a bit more democratic. As soon as standards exist, so does fair competition. We hope this will dramatically improve the quality of the grid and accelerate the deployment of applications for it."

ETICS is funded partially by the European Commission and includes five partners: CERN in Switzerland; the Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy; the University of Wisconsin-Madison; 4D Soft Ltd.; and Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA.

Learn more at the ETICS Web site.