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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
THE GRIDS CENTER: SCIENCE,
ENGINEERING, INDUSTRY
By Tom Garritano, GRIDS Center, GRIDtoday
Contributing Editor
In September 2001, the GRIDS Center, www.grids-center.org, became
one
of the first two teams created by the NSF Middleware Initiative, addressing a
critical need for software infrastructure to support scientific and
engineering research. GRIDS is a partnership of the leading organizations
involved in development and deployment of Grid technologies. Recently renewed
through Fall 2006, GRIDS can be relied upon for well-tested, deployed and
supported middleware based on common architectures used by hundreds of
projects around the world.
GRIDS develops production-quality middleware while defining open-source,
open-architecture standards that create important new avenues of on-line
collaboration and resource sharing. Software and services packaged by GRIDS
are central to virtually every Grid deployment for science and engineering.
Collectively, these tools make up a standard core of Grid services that can be
easily implemented and upon which customized applications may be built by a
broad community of open-source software developers.
GRIDS Software And Services
Still the largest of NMI's systems-integration projects, GRIDS specializes
in
the design, development, testing and deployment of Grid middleware, a key
enabling technology for the emerging cyberinfrastructure. The GRIDS Center
Software Suite consists of tested, hardened, and supported middleware that
includes the Globus Toolkit, Condor-G, the Network Weather Service, MyProxy,
MPICH-G2 and others that are widely used internationally for research and
industry. By deploying GRIDS tools, these diverse communities avoid having to
create their own infrastructure, yielding greater functionality,
interoperability and standardization among projects while maximizing the
benefit of IT investments by the public and private sectors.
Among the large-scale deployments turning to GRIDS for their core
middleware
are BIRN, the Bioinformatics Research Network; GEON, the Geoscience Network;
GriPhyN, the Grid Physics Network; the Particle Physics Data Grid; the
International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory; NEESgrid, part of the George S.
Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation; the U.K. e-Science
Program; and the E.U. DataGrid.
Open Source, Open Architecture
GRIDS leaders are defining the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) that
extends capabilities of popular Web services, giving software developers
powerful new standardized tools for creating customized applications. The IT
industry is building significant product offerings on key GRIDS components,
taking advantage of the latest Grid services developed in part with NMI
support.
Over a dozen leading companies -- including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and
Platform
Computing -- have committed to Globus Toolkit-based Grid services for their
products. Starting with NMI-R4, the GRIDS Center Software Suite includes
Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3), the first full-scale deployment of Open Grid Services
Infrastructure (OGSI) specifications. It includes significant contributions
from the University of Edinburgh and the Swedish Royal Institute of
Technology, for database access and security, respectively. Another sign of
Grid services' international impact is a recent user survey by the U.K.
Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), whose
community ranked the deployment of GT3 as their number one priority.
GRIDS Futures
With its NMI funding extended, GRIDS is undertaking new initiatives such as
creation of a federated bug-tracking facility that further links the center's
multiple sites and speeding enhancements to the code base. An expanded GRIDS
testing capability is to consist of four interlocking activities: (1)
formulation of a testing framework that meets Grid community needs and can be
integrated into the development and deployment of Grid middleware; (2) design
and implementation of a Grid-scalable testing harness ("glue" APIs and
services); (3) design, implementation and operation of a multi-level
distributed testing facility; and (4) configuration, distribution and support
of the testing harness, initially targeting specific grid enabled application
communities.
Simultaneously, GRIDS is increasing outreach to communities at all levels.
This includes directly engaging large-scale Grid deployments to make the core
GRIDS infrastructure more adaptive to changing needs of a particular
community; identifying and counseling major IT-dependent projects that could
more effectively use the Grid; and highlighting opportunities for new
communities not yet using the Grid. To increase awareness, the center is
developing public databases like the Grid Projects and Deployments System
(with examples describing where and how the technology is used) and the Grid
Technology Repository (a storehouse for open source contributions from the
community at large).
Part Of The NSF Middleware Initiative
NMI resulted from a June 2000 advisory panel report to the Division of
Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research (ANIR), part of the NSF
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). The
report identified two crucial roles that were at that time unfilled:
"One is avoiding the replication of functions needed across different
applications, and the second is facilitating access to new core infrastructure
functions through APIs and software libraries. Thus, there are several
distinct needs: Functions and services that expand the core infrastructure,
standardized APIs to simplify access to those enhanced capabilities, and
enhancement layers that can optionally be added to the core infrastructure to
meet the needs of a narrower category of applications."
GRIDS helps NMI fill those roles by producing a suite of tested, hardened,
and
supported Grid software that various scientific communities can use to build
their own customized applications. The investment in GRIDS by NSF is an
extremely efficient way to minimize duplication of effort by the greater IT
research community that -- without such core infrastructure -- would expend
far greater sums on software development while achieving far less
interoperability and utility.
Acclaim For GRIDS Components
Acclaim for components in the GRIDS distribution includes the R&D 100 Award
and the Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Technology
Transfer. Two GRIDS principal investigators were among the InfoWorld 2003 Top
Ten Innovators, and MIT Technology Review featured their Grid R&D in its "Ten
Technologies That Will Change the World." And the New York Times cited the
Grid services architecture's "far-sighted simplicity" as key to the bright
future predicted for this technology.
GRIDS Members
GRIDS member institutions are the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at
the
University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, Argonne National
Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the
University of California-San Diego and the University of Wisconsin. The GRIDS
suite is based on contributions from these organizations, and others such as
UC Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan and the University of
Tennessee.
Acknowledgements
Primary support for GRIDS comes from the National Science Foundation
Middleware Initiative (program 4089, award numbers 0123961, 0123973, 0330685,
0330670 and 0330634). GRIDS software developers wish also to acknowledge the
U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, DARPA, the U.K. e-Science Program, the
Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, IBM and Microsoft for additional
support of individual GRIDS components.
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