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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
NSF NMI RELEASE 4.0 FEATURES
LATEST IN GRID SERVICES
Today's fourth release by the National Science Foundation Middleware
Initiative (NMI) includes a wide range of software, services, documents and
recommendations for the effective use of information technology in research
and education. NMI-R4 emphasizes open-source solutions to issues critical to
collaboration across multiple organizations that may be separated by geography
and by divergent local computing architectures.
The release, available free to the public at www.nsf-middleware.org,
is designed to facilitate sharing of online resources. NMI-R4 includes a
robust collection of tools and services for organizations to build their
security and identity management infrastructure. New and updated components in
NMI-R4 include several that emphasize Grid services, a new type of capability
that uses open-source, open-architecture tools to build on popular Web service
standards. Grid services make it much simpler for developers to create
easy-to-use applications for accessing massive databases, computing power,
networks and instrumentation across the Internet.
"NMI-R4 is a diverse set of software and related tools," said Kevin
Thompson,
NSF program director for NMI. "In addition to its being the first Grid
services-compliant NMI release, it has new components that will help
universities and other institutions collaborate via multimedia conferencing
and enable appropriate access management using single sign-on Web-enabled
authentication, and authorization packages. Standards-based software and other
tools distributed by NMI are having significant impact not only in research
and education, but also in business sectors that are gravitating to the Grid
and developing and deploying federation-based services."
NMI's move into Grid services is led by the Globus Toolkit 3.02, which is
the
de facto standard middleware that enables the Grid. Contributed through the
NMI GRIDS Center by the international Globus Alliance, GT3 is the first
full-scale implementation of the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI)
specification that was approved in 2003 by the Global Grid Forum, Grid
computing's standards body. It includes all the functionality of earlier
versions, with dramatically redesigned capabilities that use OGSI-based
"service primitives" that -- rather than stipulating precise services --
instead establish a nucleus of behavior common to all Grid/Web services that
can be leveraged by meta- and system-level services. GT3 uses this
specification to provide powerful tools for resource monitoring, discovery,
management, security and file transfer.
The release also features a rich variety of tools contributed by the
NMI-EDIT
Consortium of Internet2, EDUCAUSE and SURA. From deployment guides and testing
packages for enterprise directories to an architecture for groups management,
the portfolio reflects and accommodates the varying requirements across the
R&E community.
Included in the EDIT release are A-Select and Cosign, two new Web
integrated
sign-on packages. The Group Tools Architecture, an emerging structure for
managing directory-enabled groups and authorization services, is also new.
Lastly, the Video Middleware Cookbook offers guidance for the deployment and
use of H.350, the ITU Directory Services Architecture for Multimedia
Conferencing originally released as commObject in NMI-R1.
Other EDIT tools updated for NMI-R4 include the LDAP Analyzer, a service to
test directory schema compliance; PERMIS, an authorization package; eduPerson,
the de facto standard directory schema for higher-education; standalone KX.509
and KCA, the Kerberos to X.509 credential converter; and the Enterprise
Directory Implementation Roadmap.
In addition to GT3, the GRIDS Center contributed several other new
components.
GridSolve, from the University of Tennessee, uses the remote procedure call
(RPC) protocol to create a client/agent/server system for remote access to
Grid-enabled hardware and software. PyGlobus, from Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, permits users to access the Globus Toolkit from Python, a
high-level scripting language. UberFTP, from the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), is an interactive client for GridFTP,
which is part of the Globus Toolkit.
Two recently added NMI systems-integration projects -- the Open Grid
Computing
Environments Collaboratory (OGCE) and the Common Instrument Middleware
Architecture (CIMA) team -- will contribute to NMI releases starting with
NMI-R5 in spring 2004. OGCE and CIMA take advantage of the latest Grid-service
specifications to, respectively, facilitate the creation of Grid portals and
ease the use of Grid-enabled instrumentation. OGCE's portals are Web-based
user interfaces that simplify the process of identifying and accessing Grid
resources. CIMA seeks to develop a standard, reusable Grid methodology for
access to devices such as synchrotrons, embedded network monitors and wireless
sensors.
NMI began with awards in September 2001 to GRIDS and EDIT, along with a
number
of smaller exploratory awards. With the continued funding of its original
teams and the addition of OGCE, CIMA and new experimental projects, NMI is at
the vanguard of an emerging "cyberinfrastructure" that NSF is designing to
facilitate 21st century collaboration in science and engineering.
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