News for and about the Internet2 community

[Greg Wood <>]

Media contact:   Peter West   (703) 292-8070   


New Software, Tools Ease Internet Collaboration and Grid Computing

A new package of software and other tools will make it easier for U.S. 
scientists, engineers and educators to collaborate across the Internet 
and use the Grid, a group of high-speed successor technologies and 
capabilities to the Internet that link high-performance networks and 
computers nationwide and around the world.

The package of "middleware," or software and services that link two or 
more otherwise unconnected applications across the Internet, was 
developed under the auspices of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) 
Middleware Initiative (NMI). NSF launched the initiative in September 
2001 by commiting $12 million over three years to create and deploy 
advanced network services that simplify access to diverse Internet 
information and services.

"To be useful, an infrastructure technology must be broadly deployed," 
said NMI co-principal investigator Ian Foster, a University of Chicago 
computer science professor and fellow at the university's Computation 
Institute. "This in turn means that the technology must be simple, 
extraordinarily valuable, or both. The challenge we face is to create 
Grid middleware that offers more functionality than the Internet on 
which it rests, while remaining simple to deploy."

NMI Release 1.0 (NMI-R1) represents the first bundling of such Grid 
software as the Globus Toolkit, CondorG and the Network Weather Service, 
along with security tools and best practices for enterprise computing 
such as eduPerson and Shibboleth. By wrapping them in a single package, 
NMI project leaders intend to ease the use and deployment of such 
middleware, making distributed, collaborative environments such as Grid 
computing and desktop video-conferencing more accessible.

"The absence of common middleware solutions is a big problem for 
researchers, scientists and educators looking to collaborate using 
advanced network applications," said Ken Klingenstein, NMI principal 
investigator and director of the Internet2 Middleware Initiative. 
"Applications either make do without middleware functions, in which case 
usability and efficiency suffer, or (they) perform middleware functions 
themselves, which leads to competing and incompatible standards. NMI 
will address these problems by working toward the deployment of 
interoperable core middleware services."

This release allows resource discovery, data-management, scheduling of 
on-line resources, and security across multiple organizations, even when 
separated by geography or technology. Astronomers might use the package 
to access a distant telescope "on demand," zooming in on fleeting solar 
flares as they occur rather than waiting for cumbersome, after-the-fact 
data analysis. Similarly, the package could help students in a public 
health course to work collaboratively on projects with colleagues in 
other countries, using video and written material stored in libraries 
around the world.

"NMI-R1 is essentially a recipe book for simplifying middleware and 
Grids," said Alan Blatecky, NSF program director for NMI. "These 
technologies in turn will serve as the basis for scientific advances, 
research and education in many disciplines, while encouraging the 
development of a suite of new capabilities and applications across the 
Internet."

NMI consists of two teams: The Grids Research Integration Deployment and 
Support (GRIDS) Center and the Enterprise and Desktop Integration 
Technologies (EDIT) Consortium. The GRIDS Center is a partnership of the 
University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute 
(ISI), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, 
the University of California-San Diego and the University of 
Wisconsin-Madison. The EDIT Consortium is led by Internet2, EDUCAUSE, 
and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA).

-NSF-

The package is available at: http://www.nsf-middleware.org/

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Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 11:24:22 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: State of the Planet 2002
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Another nice multicast event from:

Alan Crosswell 
<>

State of the Planet 2002
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sop2002/
May 13-14, 2002

State of the Planet 2002:
A Conference Exploring Science and Sustainability

MPEG-1 RTP (IPTV compatible)

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