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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
GRID TECHNOLOGY WIDE-REACHING IN WORLD OF SCIENCE
The study of Alzheimer's disease and the analysis of particle collisions may
not appear to have much in common, but behind the scenes, middleware being
developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is helping
groups of researchers in neuroscience, physics and other fields to apply the
power of Grid-based computational resources.
Spanning 14 universities and 22 research groups, the growing Biomedical
Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is establishing the cyberinfrastructure,
or integrated information technology configuration, needed to facilitate
health care research for large-scale data sharing and analysis. The ability to
share and compare massive data sets such as MRI brain scans or high resolution
electron microscopy images is essential to participants' research into
Alzheimer's disease, depression, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis and other
disorders.
With the participating research labs connected by the Internet2
high-performance network, the BIRN cyberinfrastructure uses software from the
NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) to harness Grid-based services and resources
for the demanding computational tasks of data mining, analysis and
visualization. The BIRN is sponsored by the National Center for Research
Resources at the National Institutes of Health.
"The BIRN has great promise to provide a collaborative working environment
that promotes the growth of interdisciplinary science as well as an advanced
biomedical cyberinfrastructure," said BIRN Coordinating Center Director Mark
Ellisman. "The NMI middleware layer is essential to providing many of the
underlying mechanisms critical to achieving this integrated environment."
By emphasizing open-source solutions that simplify resource sharing, NMI is
making it easier for scientists, engineers and educators to work with
colleagues on a worldwide scale through high-speed networks. The integrated
tools from NMI facilitate collaborations across organizations, information
technology architectures, operating systems and security policies.
Since 2002, NMI has issued twice-yearly releases of software, services and
documentation supporting the effective use of information technology for
research and education. Issued on May 24, NMI Release 5 (NMI-R5) consists of
contributions from a wide range of middleware developers that partner through
multi institutional NMI-funded teams at the GRIDS Center, the EDIT consortium
and the Open Grid Computing Environments consortium.
"Before NMI, many research communities were developing independent-and often
incompatible-middleware solutions," said Kevin Thompson, NSF program director
for NMI. "The successful use of the NMI releases by BIRN, Grid3 and other
teams shows that NMI's open-source and open-standards approaches can help
scientists avoid 'reinventing the wheel' and provide a common foundation for
building customized applications."
Worlds away from neuroscience, the Grid3 project faces similar challenges in
data management and computing requirements for particle physics and biological
science. To conduct simulations of elementary particles that require massive
amounts of data, the Grid3 collaborators, supported by both NSF and the
Department of Energy, have deployed an international data Grid spread across
28 sites in the United States and abroad and held together in part by
NMI-supported software, such as the Globus Toolkit.
With assembled resources that provide up to 2,000 processors' worth of
computational power, the Grid3 data Grid runs seven different
applications-three high-energy physics simulations and four data-analysis
programs for high-energy physics, biochemistry, astrophysics and astronomy.
The Grid-enabled calculations simulate collisions of subatomic particles,
biological interactions between molecules and protein sequences important to
genome analysis.
Beyond Grid computing, NMI middleware also enables many types of collaborative
computing in the research and education community. Shibboleth, an NMI-EDIT
software suite that manages user access to Web content and services while
protecting privacy, has experienced worldwide adoption in addition to having
widespread national impact.
Chosen by Australia, the Netherlands, and Finland and implemented in
Switzerland as the basis for their national education federations, Shibboleth
is also being adopted by the United Kingdom, which has made a significant
commitment to standardize on the software. The U.K. Joint Information Systems
Committee has begun work on building a national Shibboleth federation for the
country's universities and colleges, alongside its current Athens access
management system.
Established in late 2001, NMI funds the design, development, testing and
deployment of middleware, key technologies upon which customized applications
are built. Specialized NMI teams are defining open-source, open-architecture
standards that are creating important new avenues of online collaboration and
resource sharing. In addition to the production-quality software and
implementation standards created by those large systems integration teams, NMI
funds smaller projects that focus on experimental middleware applications. As
a leading part of the emerging cyberinfrastructure, NMI software and services
are used by thousands of researchers and educators in the United States and
beyond.
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