MIDDLEWARE

Next NMI Release Helps to Further Scientific Work Through the Development of Tools for Identity and Content-enabling Infrastructures Across Organizations - Providing new event diagnostic, privilege management, and portal-building tools, the ninth release of the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI-R9) makes further progress in addressing the challenge of collaborating online in a shared cyberinfrastructure environment. NMI-R9 is available to the public for downloading under open-source licenses at its Web site. New for this release is NMI-EDIT's End-to-END Diagnostic Discovery (EDDY) Toolkit that supports integrated analysis and diagnosis of distributed, layered and interdependent components and systems. "This release offers a critical step towards managing and troubleshooting the complex distributed environments that we're building to support science," said Ken Klingenstein, Director of Middleware and Security at Internet2. "NMI-EDIT's EDDY Toolkit is a diagnostic model intended to encourage discussion and experimentation in this area." NMI-EDIT's components also include the first production release of the Signet Privilege Management System, already receiving widespread national interest. Building on the international adoption of the Shibboleth System, the Meta-Access Management System (MAMS) project in Australia contributed their Shibboleth Attribute Release Policy Editor (ShARPE), which organizations can use to construct information release policies for their Shibboleth identity-provider infrastructure. Updated components for NMI-R9 include the Grouper Group Management Toolkit and an additional ten tools, software packages, practice documents, and schema that support institutional and federated identity management environments. In conjunction with the NMI R9 release, Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE), another NMI team, is announcing a major revision of its software that enables the creation of Grid portals or web-based user interfaces that simplify the process of identifying and accessing Grid resources. In a single download and one-step build process, the OGCE Version 2.0 provides a complete toolkit for building science-portal gateways. Newly incorporated Sakai collaboration portlets provide access to their tools such as calendar scheduling, document sharing and chat functions. Also included are Grid portlet clients to the Globus Toolkit 4 services for credential acquisition, remote command execution, and remote file management. The release also features new portlets for Condor and the Storage Resource Broker and optional support for PURSe Grid account management. The OGCE portlet software and plugin modules are integrated with the GridSphere 2.1 portal container and include GridPort information and file management Web services, which may be deployed as separate "science gateway" services. The GRIDS Center's contribution to NMI-R9 is an integrated middleware suite for Grid systems and applications. This suite includes well known tools such as the Globus Toolkit and Condor as well as specialized tools for scientific parameter studies, parallel programs, numerical solvers, data-intensive computing, and distributed applications. Binary packages are offered for ten of the most popular Unix systems used by Grid applications in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Components in the GRIDS suite are used in a wide range of ambitious scientific systems and applications, including the Open Science Grid, TeraGrid, the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, the Southern California Earthquake Center, and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network.