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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 22, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 38
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Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
NSF Awards Extend Middleware
Development Efforts
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $9 million to support 20
projects as part of its ongoing NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). The projects
extend NMI's efforts to develop and distribute production-quality open-source
and open-standards middleware and include awards that focus on experimental
applications of new middleware capabilities.
Middleware is software that connects two or more otherwise separate
applications across the Internet and allows those applications to share
computers, data, networks and instruments. NMI participants have so far issued
three releases-packages of several dozen integrated components-that are
pointing the way toward a persistent national middleware infrastructure for
research and enterprise computing.
"The NMI awardees are developing the shared cybertools that will help
define
the cyberinfrastructure of tomorrow," said Peter Freeman, head of NSF's
Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering directorate. "New projects
on Grid portals and Grid middleware for instruments represent exciting new
areas for NMI. These awards work within the standards-based Open Grid Services
Architecture and will extend the usability and capabilities of the
cyberinfrastructure for a broad community of users."
In the experimental category, new NMI awards include efforts to develop
collaboration tools, essential software libraries for Grid-based parallel
computing and tools for Grid-based databases. In the system integrator
category, awards focus on the deployment and support of robust middleware that
help researchers and educators access the cyberinfrastructure.
The largest new NMI award, to the Open Grids Computing Environment (OGCE)
consortium, is a collaboration to simplify the development of "Grid portals,"
Web-based user interfaces to applications that may access a broad array of
resources and services on the Grid. Marlon Pierce of Indiana University leads
the effort, with collaborators at the University of Michigan, the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois,
the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas and the
University of Chicago.
Donald McMullen at Indiana University leads another NMI project to develop
a
standard Grid middleware architecture that will improve the accessibility and
integration of scientific instruments. The team will evaluate the middleware
on three different instrument types: a synchrotron source, embedded network
performance monitors and a wireless sensor network. This project is aimed in
part at supporting international collaborations to share large scientific
instrument resources and leverages two other NSF-funded network and middleware
projects-the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) and
the TransPAC high-performance international Internet project.
Several of the awards continue and expand NMI's existing activities by the
Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support (GRIDS) Center, led by Randal
Butler at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Carl
Kesselman at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences
Institute (ISI), and the Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies
(EDIT) Consortium, led by Ken Klingenstein at Internet2. These NMI teams are
developing, deploying and supporting an integrated national middleware
infrastructure for science and engineering applications. A new award to Miron
Livny at the University of Wisconsin, expands middleware testing efforts
previously supported through earlier GRIDS Center awards.
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, ISI, NCSA at the University of Illinois, the San
Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California-San Diego,
and the University of Wisconsin. Ian Foster at the University of Chicago is
the overall director of GRIDS. 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 launched NMI in 2001, awarding $12 million over three years to create
and
deploy advanced network services that simplify access to diverse Internet
information and services. In 2002, NMI supported the creation of the
eight-university NMI Integration Testbed, managed by SURA, to provide
"real-life" evaluation and feedback on NMI middleware software, specifications
and services.
The National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency that
supports
fundamental research and education across all fields of science and
engineering, with an annual budget of nearly $5.3 billion. National Science
Foundation funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000
universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 30,000
competitive requests for funding, and makes about 10,000 new funding awards.
The National Science Foundation also awards over $200 million in professional
and service contracts yearly.
Useful National Science Foundation Web Sites include:
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