News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren Rotman" <>]

NSF MIDDLEWARE INITIATIVE RELEASE 8 ENABLES RESEARCH COMMUNITIES TO DEVELOP
AND USE SHARED CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
 
Grid and federated identity management software and resources ease the use
and development of research tools for the advancement of science and
engineering
 
October 18, 2005 - Working with research communities to provide development
and access management tools for Grid and other research environments, the
eighth release of the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative
(NMI-R8) helps to facilitate the complex resource management and security
required in a shared cyberinfrastructure. NMI-R8 is available to the public
for downloading under open-source licenses at http://www.nsf-middleware.org.
 
NMI-R8 marks two important "firsts" for the NMI program: the addition and
integration of Ninf-G, the first non-U.S. developed component included in
the GRIDS Center software suite; and GridShib, the first software enabling
interoperability between the GlobusR Toolkit and ShibbolethR federating
software.
 
Ninf-G is a GridRPC reference implementation developed at the National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.
"Tanaka-san and the co-developers of Ninf-G are very active in both the
Global Grid Forum's GridRPC group and PRAGMA (Pacific Rim Applications and
Grid Middleware Assembly). GGF drives Grid Standards and PRAGMA provides a
collaborative environment for an international group of scientists to
practically apply grid technologies to their applications by sharing
software and experiences." said Philip Papadopoulos, Program Director, Grid
and Cluster Computing at San Diego Supercomputer Center. "Through PRAGMA, we
learned how researchers in Japan and Asia Pacific were making productive use
of Ninf-G and believed that this could be very useful software for the NSF
Middleware audience. With the integration of Ninf-G into the GRIDS Center
stack, we're also learning about the practical issues of sharing and
supporting software across borders and languages and see this activity as an
important pilot study." 
 
Another featured component, GridShib, enables interoperability between the
Globus Toolkit and Shibboleth federating software. Using this package,
researchers who are members of both brick-and-mortar institutions and
Globus-enabled virtual organizations can use their local campus credentials
to access their distributed Grid-based resources. GridShib is included in
the NMI-EDIT release.
 
For the full release, refer to
http://www.nsf-middleware.org/Lists/NMIR8/pressrelease.aspx
 
####

For more information:
GRIDS Center:  http://www.grids-center.org NMI-EDIT Consortium:
http://www.nmi-edit.org OGCE Team:  http://www.collab-ogce.org/nmi/index.jsp
CIMA Team: http://www.instrumentmiddleware.org/

Media Contacts:
Ann West     (906-487-1726, 
)
NMI-EDIT