g-Eclipse Technology Project

Over the last few years Grid infrastructures have been becoming the backbone of those fields of science and research that require to solve complex computational problems. At the same time the commercial application of Grid technologies has led to new categories of offerings (e.g. on-demand offerings) and will likely play an important role in the "software as a service" landscape. However, the complexity of Grid infrastructures is often discouraging to new and inexperienced users and impedes the use of Grid technologies in new application domains.

By providing an integrated Grid enabled environment based on Eclipse (called g-Eclipse) this project aims at facilitating the use of Grid infrastructures. As an integrating tool g-Eclipse will have impact on the different actors in the Grid domain. Grid users will access the Grid with g-Eclipse in an easy and uniform way, instead of having to use application specific portals or specific Grid consoles. Developers can take advantage of the large variety of languages that are supported by Eclipse and benefit from a standard mechanism to deploy applications on Grid infrastructures.

With the flexible and open plug-in approach of g-Eclipse, the management interface of new Grid applications can be customized and deployed relatively easily. It shall be possible to reuse already existing management components.

g-Eclipse will deliver exemplary support for the EGEE middleware gLite/LCG, which is deployed on the biggest Grid infrastructure currently available. This middleware provides a solid basis for exemplary tools, as the number of generic applications will increase in the second phase of EGEE (a European Grid initiative), and thus the number of potential adopters of the g-Eclipse platform will increase in the same way. However, as g-Eclipse is following a frameworks and exemplary tools approach, other middleware like UNICORE and GT4 can also be integrated by extending g-Eclipse.

With the proposed g-Eclipse project, Eclipse enters the area of Grid applications and e-Science. The consortium that is submitting this proposal will receive funding by the European Union under contract number IST-034327 to implement and establish g-Eclipse.