D-JRA3.1 Distributed Laboratory Middleware

One of the key objectives of the ERIGrid 2.0 project is the virtual integration of geographically distributed Research Infrastructures to realise the vision of a joint virtual Research Infrastructure. Towards this end, this work focused on developing laboratory-based middleware and data exchange as a service, respectively. The middleware is a set of shared software tools and services to seamlessly integrate Research Infrastructure (RI)s, such as transport protocols, interface semantics, etc. This document presents the summary of the work undertaken in the two tasks, more specially:

Software development of a simplified and standardised interface, i.e., Universal Application Programming Interface. The Universal Application Programming Interface eliminates the need for users to understand the diverse details of each individual Research Infrastructure, by providing a tool-agnostic interface for accessing and interacting with other Research Infrastructures. It has been designed to support various applications, such as co-simulation and distributed laboratory experiments. The Universal Application Programming Interface is an integral part of the middleware and seeks to simplify the process of joint multi-RI experiments.
Proof-of-concept of data exchange between multiple Research Infrastructures as a service using the developed Universal Application Programming Interface. This demonstration shows how the chosen middleware development covers the required services for data exchange.
This document also provides example documentation for the developed software tools with links to the respective code repositories to enable Research Infrastructure integration.