MIDDLEWARE

The fourth release by the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI) includes a wide range of software, services, documents and recommendations for the effective use of information technology in research and education. NMI-R4 emphasizes open-source solutions to issues critical to collaboration across multiple organizations that may be separated by geography and by divergent local computing architectures. The release, available for free to the public at http://www.nsf-middleware.org, is designed to facilitate sharing of on-line resources. NMI-R4 includes a robust collection of tools and services for organizations to build their security and identity management infrastructure. New and updated components in NMI-R4 include several that emphasize Grid services, a new type of capability that uses open-source, open-architecture tools to build on popular Web service standards. Grid services make it much simpler for developers to create easy-to-use applications for accessing massive databases, computing power, networks and instrumentation across the Internet. "NMI-R4 is a diverse set of software and related tools," said Kevin Thompson, NSF program director for NMI. "In addition to its being the first Grid services-compliant NMI release, it has new components that will help universities and other institutions collaborate via multimedia conferencing and enable appropriate access management using single sign-on web-enabled authentication, and authorization packages. Standards-based software and other tools distributed by NMI are having significant impact not only in research and education, but also in business sectors that are gravitating to the Grid and developing and deploying federation-based services." NMI's move into Grid services is led by the Globus Toolkit 3.02, which is the de facto standard middleware that enables the Grid. Contributed through the NMI GRIDS Center by the international Globus Alliance, GT3 is the first full-scale implementation of the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) specification that was approved in 2003 by the Global Grid Forum, Grid computing's standards body. It includes all the functionality of earlier versions, with dramatically redesigned capabilities that use OGSI-based "service primitives" that -- rather than stipulating precise services -- instead establish a nucleus of behavior common to all Grid/Web services that can be leveraged by meta- and system-level services. GT3 uses this specification to provide powerful tools for resource monitoring, discovery, management, security and file transfer. The release also features a rich variety of tools contributed by the NMI-EDIT Consortium of Internet2, EDUCAUSE and SURA. From deployment guides and testing packages for enterprise directories to an architecture for groups management, the portfolio reflects and accommodates the varying requirements across the R&E community. Included in the EDIT release are A-Select and Cosign, two new web integrated sign-on packages. The Group Tools Architecture, an emerging structure for managing directory-enabled groups and authorization services, is also new. Lastly, the Video Middleware Cookbook offers guidance for the deployment and use of H.350, the ITU Directory Services Architecture for Multimedia Conferencing originally released as commObject in NMI-R1. Other EDIT tools updated for NMI-R4 include the LDAP Analyzer, a service to test directory schema compliance; PERMIS, an authorization package; eduPerson, the de facto standard directory schema for higher-education; standalone KX.509 and KCA, the Kerberos to X.509 credential converter; and the Enterprise Directory Implementation Roadmap. In addition to GT3, the GRIDS Center contributed several other new components. GridSolve, from the University of Tennessee, uses the remote procedure call (RPC) protocol to create a client/agent/server system for remote access to Grid-enabled hardware and software. PyGlobus, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, permits users to access the Globus Toolkit from Python, a high-level scripting language. UberFTP, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), is an interactive client for GridFTP, which is part of the Globus Toolkit. Two recently added NMI systems-integration projects -- the Open Grid Computing Environments Collaboratory (OGCE) and the Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) team -- will contribute to NMI releases starting with NMI-R5 in spring 2004. OGCE and CIMA take advantage of the latest Grid-service specifications to, respectively, facilitate the creation of Grid portals and ease the use of Grid-enabled instrumentation. OGCE's portals are Web-based user interfaces that simplify the process of identifying and accessing Grid resources. CIMA seeks to develop a standard, reusable Grid methodology for access to devices such as synchrotrons, embedded network monitors and wireless sensors. NMI began with awards in September 2001 to GRIDS and EDIT, along with a number of smaller exploratory awards. With the continued funding of its original teams and the addition of OGCE, CIMA and new experimental projects, NMI is at the vanguard of an emerging "cyberinfrastructure" that NSF is designing to facilitate 21st Century collaboration in science and engineering.