The European Middleware Initiative project (EMI) is a collaboration among European grid middleware providers to develop and maintain a software platform for high performance distributed computing. It is at the core of grid middleware distributions used by scientific research communities and distributed computing infrastructures all over the world including EGI - the leading European grid computing infrastructure - and WLCG - the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid - which supports, for example, the search for the Higgs boson and new types of matter searches of the physicists at LHC, together with other large scientific challenges in astronomy, biology, computational chemistry and other sciences. Being a close collaboration among well-established grid middleware providers and other specialized software providers, EMI proposes itself as a leading platform for scientific grid computing in diverse scientific research fields.