ENGINEERING

By Tom Garritano of the GRIDS Center -- In September 2001, the GRIDS Center (http://www.grids-center.org) became one of the first two teams created by the NSF Middleware Initiative, addressing a critical need for software infrastructure to support scientific and engineering research. GRIDS is a partnership of the leading organizations involved in development and deployment of Grid technologies. Recently renewed through Fall 2006, GRIDS can be relied upon for well-tested, deployed and supported middleware based on common architectures used by hundreds of projects around the world. GRIDS develops production-quality middleware while defining open-source, open-architecture standards that create important new avenues of on-line collaboration and resource sharing. Software and services packaged by GRIDS are central to virtually every Grid deployment for science and engineering. Collectively, these tools make up a standard core of Grid services that can be easily implemented and upon which customized applications may be built by a broad community of open-source software developers. GRIDS Software and Services Still the largest of NMI's systems-integration projects, GRIDS specializes in the design, development, testing, and deployment of Grid middleware, a key enabling technology for the emerging cyberinfrastructure. The GRIDS Center Software Suite consists of tested, hardened, and supported middleware that includes the Globus Toolkit®, Condor-G, the Network Weather Service, MyProxy, MPICH-G2 and others that are widely used internationally for research and industry. By deploying GRIDS tools, these diverse communities avoid having to create their own infrastructure, yielding greater functionality, interoperability and standardization among projects while maximizing the benefit of IT investments by the public and private sectors. Among the large-scale deployments turning to GRIDS for their core middleware are BIRN, the Bioinformatics Research Network; GEON, the Geoscience Network; GriPhyN, the Grid Physics Network; the Particle Physics Data Grid; the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory; NEESgrid, part of the George S. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation; the U.K. e-Science Program; and the E.U. DataGrid. Open Source, Open Architecture GRIDS leaders are defining the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) that extends capabilities of popular Web services, giving software developers powerful new standardized tools for creating customized applications. The IT industry is building significant product offerings on key GRIDS components, taking advantage of the latest Grid services developed in part with NMI support. Over a dozen leading companies -- including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Platform Computing -- have committed to Globus Toolkit-based Grid services for their products. Starting with NMI-R4, the GRIDS Center Software Suite includes Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3), the first full-scale deployment of Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) specifications. It includes significant contributions from the University of Edinburgh and the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, for database access and security, respectively. Another sign of Grid services’ international impact is a recent user survey by the U.K. Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), whose community ranked the deployment of GT3 as their number one priority. GRIDS Futures With its NMI funding extended, GRIDS is undertaking new initiatives such as creation of a federated bug-tracking facility that further links the center’s multiple sites and speeding enhancements to the code base. An expanded GRIDS testing capability is to consist of four interlocking activities: (1) formulation of a testing framework that meets Grid community needs and can be integrated into the development and deployment of Grid middleware; (2) design and implementation of a Grid-scalable testing harness ("glue" APIs and services); (3) design, implementation and operation of a multi-level distributed testing facility; and (4) configuration, distribution, and support of the testing harness, initially targeting specific grid enabled application communities. Simultaneously, GRIDS is increasing outreach to communities at all levels. This includes directly engaging large-scale Grid deployments to make the core GRIDS infrastructure more adaptive to changing needs of a particular community; identifying and counseling major IT-dependent projects that could more effectively use the Grid; and highlighting opportunities for new communities not yet using the Grid. To increase awareness, the center is developing public databases like the Grid Projects and Deployments System (with examples describing where and how the technology is used) and the Grid Technology Repository (a storehouse for open source contributions from the community at large). Part of the NSF Middleware Initiative NMI resulted from a June 2000 advisory panel report to the Division of Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research (ANIR), part of the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). The report identified two crucial roles that were at that time unfilled: “One is avoiding the replication of functions needed across different applications, and the second is facilitating access to new core infrastructure functions through APIs and software libraries. Thus, there are several distinct needs: Functions and services that expand the core infrastructure, standardized APIs to simplify access to those enhanced capabilities, and enhancement layers that can optionally be added to the core infrastructure to meet the needs of a narrower category of applications.” GRIDS helps NMI fill those roles by producing a suite of tested, hardened, and supported Grid software that various scientific communities can use to build their own customized applications. The investment in GRIDS by NSF is an extremely efficient way to minimize duplication of effort by the greater IT research community that -- without such core infrastructure -- would expend far greater sums on software development while achieving far less interoperability and utility. Acclaim for GRIDS Components Acclaim for components in the GRIDS distribution includes the R&D 100 Award and the Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer. Two GRIDS principal investigators were among the InfoWorld 2003 Top Ten Innovators, and MIT Technology Review featured their Grid R&D in its “Ten Technologies That Will Change the World.” And the New York Times cited the Grid services architecture’s “far-sighted simplicity” as key to the bright future predicted for this technology. GRIDS Members GRIDS member institutions are the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The GRIDS suite is based on contributions from these organizations, and others such as UC Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan and the University of Tennessee. Acknowledgements Primary support for GRIDS comes from the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (program 4089, award numbers 0123961, 0123973, 0330685, 0330670, and 0330634). GRIDS software developers wish also to acknowledge the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, DARPA, the U.K. e-Science Program, the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, IBM and Microsoft for additional support of individual GRIDS components