Increasing e-Infrastructure Usability: The EELA-2 Experience

The heterogeneous requirements of e-Science applications belonging to several scientific domains makes difficult to provide them with a support able to satisfy all the different needs. Usually, the grid middleware adopted provides applications with general tools unable to meet specific requirements. For this reason, a really powerful e-Infrastructure has to offer some additional services to complete and integrate the functionalities of the basic grid middleware. These services have both to increase the set of functionalities offered by the e-Infrastructure and to make the task of developing and deploying new applications easier. Following this methodology, EELA-2, a project co-funded by the European Commission and involving European and Latin American countries, has fully deployed 53 e-Science applications. This paper describes the services developed to achieve this outstanding result.