Middleware Announcements

[Renee Frost <>]

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 Globus® Toolkit and Shibboleth® 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

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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/