INDUSTRY

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has received a $180,000, three-year award from the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) to participate as a testbed site in the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Middleware Initiative (NMI) program. The award will enable TACC to test and implement "middleware" components developed and packaged under the NMI program. Middleware refers to the software that is common to multiple applications and builds on the network transport services to enable ready development of new distributed computing applications and network services, in particular "grid computing" technologies such as Globus (developed by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman), the Network Weather Service (led by Rich Wolski/UC Santa Barbara), the NPACI Rocks cluster software (Phil Papadopoulos, San Diego Supcomputer Center), and the SDSC Storage Resource Broker (Reagan Moore, San Diego Supercomputer Center). "These Grid computing technologies have begun to reach a stage of maturity, integration, and utilization within the scientific computing community such that large problems are being solved using these technologies," said Mary Thomas, manager of the TACC Grid Computing Group and the principal investigator on the proposal. "Furthermore, the business community has begun to recognize the relevance of Grid concepts for e-commerce, as evidenced by the integration of Grid concepts into products such as the Sun Grid Engine and IBM WebSphere products." Thomas and Dr. Shyamal Mitra, a TACC researcher and a co-principal investigator on the proposal, are active in grid software research and development as well as evaluation and implementation. TACC is expanding its Grid computing program and is actively involved in evaluating, developing and deploying Grid technologies relevant to a UT-Austin campus-wide Grid, as well as the TeraGrid, the High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) Texas Internet Grid for Research & Education (TIGRE) project, the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG), and and the Department of Energy (DoE) Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) National Collaboratories program. In addition to software evaluation and deployment, the NMI testing environment will be used to evaluate policies, recommendations, specifications, services, and application programming interfaces (APIs). "Participation in this program provides TACC the opportunity to help shape the future of grid computing technology development and position itself at the forefront of Grid research," said Mitra. "This is a tremendous opportunity for TACC and for UT Austin in general," said Dr. Jay Boisseau, TACC Director and the other co-principal investigator on the proposal. "We are excited to contribute to the NMI program, which will provide the software foundation for the NSF TeraGrid and other national grid computing initiatives."