Scientific
Applications:
NSF FINE-TUNES THE
GRID
The National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI) issued its
third
release of software tools carefully chosen for their value and ability to
interoperate as part of the emerging NSF cyberinfrastructure for 21st century
science and engineering.
Available free to the public at www.nsf-middleware.org
NMI-R3 has components developed at universities and national laboratories,
designed to fill functions needed by the research and education community such
as user authentication and authorization, resource identification and
allocation, job management, and scheduling.
NMI software is helping to remove traditional obstacles that hinder
effective
multi-institutional teamwork. For example, every university has local
policies for identifying users while ensuring privacy and security. The tools
provided by NMI can reconcile variations in policy and technology from campus
to campus, while leaving control in the hands of local administrators, which
eases the deployment of applications for grid computing and other forms of
collaboration.
"The practice of science and engineering is being transformed by a new
generation of integrated computing, information and communications tools-
cyberinfrastructure," said Peter Freeman, NSF assistant director for Computer
and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). "NMI activities ease the
deployment of shared cybertools that are critical to NSF's plans to expand
this cyberinfrastructure to advance scientific discovery, education and
innovation in areas of considerable benefit to society."
NSF supports two primary NMI teams: The EDIT Consortium (for "Enterprise
and
Desktop Integration Technologies") and the GRIDS Center (for "Grid Research
Integration Deployment and Support"). EDIT develops tools, practices and
architectures to leverage campus infrastructures to facilitate multi-
institutional collaboration. NMI-R3 includes four new EDIT components-LOOK,
SAGE, Enterprise Directory Implementation Roadmap, and Permis-which support
directory performance monitoring, group management, and service deployment as
well as inter-institutional authorization. Also updated for NMI-R3 is
Shibboleth, an architecture and suite of software used for accessing
customized or restricted content and services while protecting privacy.
"For a number of years, we've seen the problems with IP authentication and
have worked with higher education and library consortia to implement new
architectures to address the current limitations," said David Yakimischak,
Chief Technology Officer for JSTOR, an on-line archive of scholarly
publications. "Shibboleth nicely addresses these inadequacies and enables the
community to offer a wide variety of value-added services, weaving local and
distributed on-line content into a unique information fabric."
Through NMI, GRIDS provides a suite of leading software from the grid
computing community. One of these is the open-source Globus Toolkit, which
has lately garnered acclaim as the "most promising new technology" among
2002's top 100 technological innovations (from R&D Magazine) and the Federal
Laboratory Consortium award for technology transfer. It is packaged in the
GRIDS Center Software Suite with other software including Condor-G, the
Network Weather Service, GSI OpenSSH, and Grid Packaging Tools. New to the
suite with NMI-R3 are a credential authority called MyProxy, a grid tool
based on the popular Message Passing Interface standard called MPICH-G2, and a
tool for customizing GRIDS component configurations called GridConfig.
NSF's ambitious Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), which includes the
TeraGrid, is creating a distributed computational infrastructure that requires
the stable, thoroughly tested software being designed by GRIDS. "Robust
software is essential to production deployment and national use," said Dan
Reed, an ETF project principal investigator, director of the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications and project director for NEESgrid, the $10
million system integration project for the NSF supported George E. Brown, Jr.
National Earthquake Engineering System (NEES). "There is no doubt that the
GRIDS Center's software packages have reduced TeraGrid's deployment time, and
I also know that NEESgrid has leveraged GRIDS components to reduce development
time and simplify engagement with that community."
In addition to the coordinating roles of GRIDS and EDIT, NSF has made other
NMI grants to individual researchers and software developers. With the most
recent fiscal year 2003 NMI solicitation deadline on March 7, the foundation
received more than 70 proposals, according to program director Kevin Thompson
of NSF. Fiscal year 2003 awards will be announced this fall.
The EDIT Consortium is led by Internet2, EDUCAUSE, and the Southeastern
Universities Research Association (SURA). The GRIDS Center is a partnership
of the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California's
Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the San
Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego,
and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to NSF's support, the
GRIDS software developers are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA.
NSF Home Page: www.nsf.gov
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