• The Globus Toolkit® from the Globus Alliance, led by Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and the University of Chicago. This set of software tools and services is the foundation on which users may build Grids and Grid-based applications. It has three key functions: Resource Management to allocate shared computers, storage, sensors, instruments, networks and software; Information Services to characterize these shared resources; and Data Management to let users access and organize information generated by resources.

• Condor-G is from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It manages both a queue of jobs and a set of resources from one or more sites where those jobs can execute. Condor-G lets the user submit many jobs at once and monitor them with a convenient interface. It notifies the users when jobs complete or fail, and it maintains Globus Toolkit credentials that may expire while a job is running. Condor-G is also fault-tolerant -- if a machine crashes, the user can still perform all of these functions after the system reboots.

• The Network Weather Service (NWS), from the University of California Santa Barbara, is a distributed, generalized system for producing short-term performance forecasts based on historical performance measurements. It features a Name Server directory to bind process and data names with low-level contact information; a Memory Server for persistent data storage; a Sensor to gather performance measurements from a resource; and a Forecaster to predict performance of a resource over specified times.

• GSI-OpenSSH is a modified version of OpenSSH that adds support for Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) authentication. Developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), it can be used to log into remote systems and transfer files between systems without entering a password. Instead, all operations can be authenticated with a valid GSI credential. GSI-OpenSSH can forward GSI credentials to a remote system on login, so the user is not required to manually create a new credential on that system.

• MyProxy is a credential repository from NCSA that lets Grid users retrieve a proxy credential on demand, without having to manage private key and certificate files. MyProxy can improve security and flexibility, so job submissions will not fail due to expired credentials.

• MPICH-G2, from Northern Illinois University and Argonne, is a Grid-enabled imple-mentation of the Message Passing Index (MPI) standard that is based on the popular MPICH library.  It works with the Globus Toolkit to link multiple machines running MPI appli-cations, even with different architectures.

• NCSA's Grid Packaging Tools (GPT), provide a straightforward way to define complex dependency and compatibility relationships between packages. Installation of the software is simplified due to bundling with GPT, which lets users choose whether to install components collectively or individually.

• The GRIDS Center suite includes KX.509, a client tool developed at the University of Michigan under the auspices of a partner NMI team, EDIT (Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies). It lets sites easily convert Kerberos certificates to the X.509 format used by the Grid. Netscape and Internet Explorer will accept these credentials for secure https web activity.

• GridConfig from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is used to configure and finetune Grid technologies. It provides an easy way to generate and regenerate configuration files in native formats, and to ensure consistency across applications.

• 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

• GridPort, from TACC, enables development of portals and applications on top of underlying distributed and grid computing infrastructure to facilitate computational science. GridPort provides a comprehensive set of capabilities for using distributed computing resources via a consistent API that presents streamlined access to backend grid services from diverse grid computing technologies. (New in NMI-R5)

• DataCutter, from Ohio State University and the University of Maryland, is a framework designed to provide support for processing of large scientific datasets in heterogeneous environments. It supports a filter-stream programming model for executing application-specific data processing, enabling combined use of task- and data-parallelism. (New in NMI-R5)

• DataCutter STORM, also from OSU and UMD, is a services-based middleware is designed to support data select and transfer operations on large and distributed scientific datasets. The objective of STORM is to enable execution of select queries on datasets stored in files distributed across a network. (New in NMI-R5)

• AppLeS Parameter Sweep Template (APST), from SDSC, is a tool that schedules and deploys parameter sweep applications on the Computational Grid. Its purpose is to schedule and deploy parameter sweep applications on the Computational Grid. Common examples include all kinds of Monte-Carlo simulations and parameter-space searches. (New in NMI-R5)

• INCA, from TeraGrid, is a generic framework automates testing, verification, and monitoring of functionality common to a set of Grid systems. (New in NMI-R5)

• Storage Resource Broker (SRB), from SDSC, is client-server middleware that provides a uniform interface for connecting to heterogeneous data resources over a network and accessing replicated data sets. SRB, in conjunction with the Metadata Catalog (MCAT), provides a way to access data sets and resources based on their attributes and/or logical names rather than their names or physical locations. (New in NMI-R5)

Acknowledgements

Primary funding for GRIDS is from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Middleware Initiative program 03-513. GRIDS software developers wish also to acknowledge support from:

• NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (for Globus Toolkit, Condor-G, NWS, MyProxy, GSI-OpenSSH, GPT and GridConfig)

• U.S. Department of Energy (for Globus Toolkit, Condor-G, NWS and MPICH-G2)

• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (for Globus Toolkit and Condor-G)

• NASA (for Globus Toolkit, MyProxy and GSI-OpenSSH)

• IBM (for Globus Toolkit)

• Microsoft Corporation (for Globus Toolkit and Condor-G)