In May 2004, the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) issued its
fifth
software release (a point release was issued in August 2004). NMI-R5.1 is aimed at the national research, education, and scientific communities.
Available free-of-charge, it integrates key software
packages, standards, and best practices toward formation of a
national middleware infrastructure. NMI-R5.1 includes
the GRIDS Software Suite, a unified package that features the
Let scientists, engineers, and educators
transparently use and share distributed resources, such as
computers, data, networks, and instruments,
Develop effective collaboration and
communications tools such as Grid technologies, desktop video,
and other advanced services to expedite research and
education, and
Develop a working architecture and approach that
can be extended to the larger set of Internet and network
users.
NMI's purpose is to design, develop, deploy and
support reusable, expandable middleware functions and services that benefit many
applications in a networked environment. As part of NMI, GRIDS software
will:
Facilitate scientific productivity
Increase research collaboration through
shared data, computing, code, facilities and applications
Support the education
enterprise
Encourage the participation of industry partners, government labs and
agencies for more extensive development and wider adoption and deployment
Establish a level of persistence and availability so that other applications
developers and disciplines can take advantage of the middleware
Encourage and
support the development of standards and open source approaches
Enable scaling
and sustainability to support the larger research and education communities
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)
