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[Greg Wood <>]

NSF MIDDLEWARE INITIATIVE CONTRIBUTES THIRD SOFTWARE RELEASE TO
CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE FOR SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Standards-based software and tools are adopted by e-science,
Universities and industry

WASHINGTON, DC, April 28, 2003 -- The National Science Foundation
Middleware Initiative (NMI) today issued its third release of software
tools carefully chosen for their value and ability to interoperate as
part of the emerging NSF cyberinfrastructure for 21st century science 
and engineering.  Available free to the public at 
http://www.nsf-middleware.org/, NMI-R3 has components developed at
universities and national laboratories, designed to fill functions
needed by the research and education community such as user 
authentication and authorization, resource identification and 
allocation, job management, and scheduling.

NSF supports two primary NMI teams: The EDIT Consortium (for "Enterprise
and Desktop Integration Technologies") and the GRIDS Center (for "Grid
Research Integration Deployment and Support").  NMI software is helping
to remove traditional obstacles that hinder effective 
multi-institutional teamwork. For example, every university has local 
policies for identifying users while ensuring privacy and security. The 
tools provided by NMI can reconcile variations in policy and technology 
from campus to campus, while leaving control in the hands of local 
administrators, which eases the deployment of applications for grid 
computing and other forms of collaboration.

"The practice of science and engineering is being transformed by a new
generation of integrated computing, information and communications
tools," said Peter Freeman, NSF assistant director for Computer and 
Information Science and Engineering (CISE).  "NMI activities ease the 
deployment of shared cybertools that are critical to NSF's plans for a
cyberinfrastructure to advance scientific discovery, education and
innovation in areas of considerable benefit to society."

Full NSF press release at http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/pr0346.htm

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