Middleware Announcements

[Lisa Hogeboom <>]

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NSF MIDDLEWARE INITIATIVE RELEASE 7 PROGRESSES TOWARDS SHARED
CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE

Grid and federated identity management tools and software ease the use
of and development for the advancement of science and engineering

June 1, 2005 - Developed for the academic science and engineering
community, the seventh release of the National Science Foundation
Middleware Initiative (NMI-R7) builds on previous work to offer coherent
development and access management technologies while concealing the
complex management and security required in a heterogeneous
cyberinfrastructure. NMI-R7 is available for downloading under
open-source licenses to the public at http://www.nsf-middleware.org.

"Providing robust distributed systems and development platforms, shared
R&E cyber-trust and services, and mechanisms to diagnose problems with
accessing resources are critical to building cyber infrastructure," said
Kevin Thompson, NSF Program Director for NMI. "The new NMI-R7 components
make progress toward this vision by easing the development and support
of Grids, offering a model for problem resolution for distributed
systems, and enabling access to shared services through Shibboleth."

The NMI-EDIT release features "Middleware End-to-End Diagnostics: An
Introduction," an architecture document that describes a foundation for
the diagnosis of resource-access problems encountered in virtual
organizations, for example. The new release of the Shibboleth software,
a federated authentication and authorization system, provides
significant progress towards supporting the Federal E-Authentication
Initiative and will enable researchers to use their institutional
credentials to access online government services and resources.

In addition, seventeen NMI-EDIT tools were updated for NMI-R7, including
Signet, a privilege management system, and Grouper, a set of group
management tools. Also now available are final versions of LDAP
directory schema and related documents, including the eduMember schema,
which supports group-related information, and the eduCourse schema,
which supports academic course information. The LocalDomainPerson Survey
Results, also in NMI-R7, summarizes how higher-education institutions
are using locally defined schemas and attributes in their enterprise
LDAP directories.

In September 2001, the first NMI systems integrator teams, GRIDS Center
and NMI-EDIT, began work along with a number of smaller targeted awards.
Along with the continued funding of its original teams, the OGCE, the
Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) team, and the new
experimental projects were added in 2003. After seven releases of
software, tools, and practices, NMI is at the leading edge of the
growing cyberinfrastructure established to support next generation
science and engineering.

For the full release, refer to
http://www.nsf-middleware.org/Lists/NMIR7/pressrelease.aspx.


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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/