29 November 2010

1. All-Hands Meeting: The 1st EMI All Hands meeting was a successful event in terms of participation and interest. A survey to collect more detailed (anonymous) feedback is being prepared. Additionally, the PEB members are preparing a list of highlights and issues resulting from the AH to be consolidated in a single 'post-mortem' assessment. The document will be circulated as soon as it is ready, possibly before the end of the year.
2. DCI Projects contact persons: EMI contact persons for all DCI Collaboration projects have been nominated with the exception of the IGE contact. The current contact persons are: EDGI: Christian Ulrik Soettrup (UCPH), StratusLab: Shahbaz Memon (Juelich), VENUS-C: Shahbaz Memon (Juelich), SIENA: Morris Riedel (Juelich). Morris Riedel will take the role of IGE contact person for the moment to allow the work to start, but a dedicated person has to be identified. A short 'mandate' document is being prepared to clarify the roles and responsibilities of the contact persons and how they are expected to interact with the DCI projects and the rest of EMI.
3. EMI supported platforms: Questions about which platforms should be supported in EMI 1 have been raised again. The TCB and SA1 are preparing a detailed proposal on platform support, which is planned to be made public next week.
4. ECB recommendations and standardization strategy: The ECB has met during the AH meeting and has come to a number of recommendations that the PEB and PTB are asked to enforce in the project activities. An important recommendation has been provided to clarify the EMI strategy on standardization. In line with the EMI objective of satisfying user needs as a top priority, the ECB recommends that "Agreement on and implementation of common EMI interfaces is a top priority task in order to achieve EMI goals; once internal agreement is reached, common EMI approaches must be propagated to standardisation bodies." This has a first immediate impact on the activities of the EMI Execution Service working group. The group is encouraged to focus primarily on finalizing the common EMI ES specifications and planning for their implementation in the relevant EMI services. Once EMI has reached an agreement and a solid understanding of the plans, the results can be shared with open standardization bodies (PGI) by all EMI members involved in the relevant standardization groups. EMI members must remember that they attend the open standardization events as EMI members and must make every effort to represent the EMI achievements and interests, while remaining open to suggestions for future improvements.
5. Key Performance Indicators: The European Commission has recently reminded the project Director that the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) listed in the Project Quality Assurance Plan (http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1277514/files/EMI-DNA1.1-1277514-Project_QA_Plan-v1.1.pdf) must be reported in each Quarterly Report. Major deviations from the agreed targets must be clearly reported. The WP leaders are now collecting the KPIs measurements for the 2nd Quarterly Report, all project members are asked to assist in collecting the relevant measurements and providing explanations for missing measurements or failed targets.
6. EMI Releases Codenames: The final PEB decision on EMI releases codenames has been reached after analysing the input from the survey. The releases will be codenamed after the four highest mountains in Countries members of EMI and satisfying a sort of fair representation of the different middleware distributions in EMI. The mountains will go from lowest to highest and will be: EMI 0 - Zugspitze (Germany), EMI 1 - Kebnekaise (Sweden), EMI 2 - Matterhorn (Switzerland), EMI 3 - Monte Bianco (Italy/France)
7. Deliverables and milestones: The following deliverables and milestones have been completed this week:

          DNA1.2.1 - EMI Service Level Agreement Template (http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1277517/files/EMI-DNA1.2.1-1277517-SLA_Template-v1.0.pdf)
          DJRA1.7.1 - EMI Software Development Quality Control Report (http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1277533/files/EMI-DJRA1.7.1-1277533-Quality_Control_Report-v1.0.pdf)
          MNA1.3 - Technical collaboration procedures with EGI and PRACE are established (http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1277541/files/EMI_MS3_v1.0.pdf)