News for and about the Internet2 community

[Michelle Pollak <>]

NSF AWARDS EXTEND MIDDLEWARE DEVELOPMENT EFFORTS IN TESTING, PORTALS AND
INSTRUMENTATION

ARLINGTON, Va., September 15, 2003 --The National Science Foundation
(NSF) has awarded $9 million to support 20 projects as part of its
ongoing NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). The projects extend NMI's
efforts to develop and distribute production-quality open-source and
open-standards middleware and include awards that focus on experimental
applications of new middleware capabilities.

Middleware is software that connects two or more otherwise separate
applications across the Internet and allows those applications to share
computers, data, networks and instruments. NMI participants have so far
issued three releases-packages of several dozen integrated
components-that are pointing the way toward a persistent national
middleware infrastructure for research and enterprise 
computing.

"The NMI awardees are developing the shared cybertools that will
help define the cyberinfrastructure of tomorrow," said Peter
Freeman, head of NSF's Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering
directorate. "New projects on grid portals and grid middleware for
instruments represent exciting new areas for NMI. These awards work
within the standards-based Open Grid Services Architecture and will
extend the usability and capabilities of the cyberinfrastructure for a
broad community of users."

The largest new NMI award, to the Open Grids Computing Environment (OGCE)
consortium, is a collaboration to simplify the development of "grid
portals," Web-based user interfaces to applications that may access
a broad array of resources and services on the grid. Another new NMI
project will develop a standard grid middleware architecture that will
improve the accessibility and integration of scientific instruments. In
addition, several of the awards continue and expand NMI's existing
activities by the Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support
(GRIDS) Center and the Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies
(EDIT) Consortium. These NMI teams are developing, deploying and
supporting an integrated national middleware infrastructure for science
and engineering applications

Full NSF press release at
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/pr0399.htm

Media contact: David Hart, (703) 292-7737, 
Program contact: Kevin Thompson, (703) 292-8950,