SCIENCE

WASHINGTON, DC -- A group of university-led organizations and research centers across the U.S. will work together on a $12 million project to develop middleware--software that allows scientists and educators to share applications, scientific instruments and data, and collaborate with their colleagues across the Internet. The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the program called the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). NMI will create and deploy advanced network services that will make it easier for Internet users to access a wide range of resources available through high-performance networks. For example, they will be able to share scientific tools, such as telescopes or modeling software, access supercomputing systems and databases, and run simulations in real-time with colleagues across the country and around the world. The effort will build on the successes of the Globus* project and the MACE** initiative in developing middleware tools, and will integrate emerging middleware components into a well-tested, comprehensive, commercial-quality, middleware distribution package that runs on multiple platforms. These middleware distributions will be disseminated to research labs and universities worldwide. Two groups will receive the awards. A team formed by Internet2 will include EDUCAUSE and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA). A second team that includes the University of Southern California School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the University of Chicago, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will establish the GRIDS (Grids Research Integration Deployment and Support) Center. "We believe that middleware and a comprehensive middleware infrastructure will be the key to creating a network infrastructure that can be used by the worldwide research community to share ideas, conduct research, and make new discoveries," said ISI's Carl Kesselman, "There is a world of resources and information out there, and we intend to bring it to the scientific community in a seamless manner, so that they can focus specifically on their research." "Much as the academic community was the proving ground for the Internet, so may this pioneering work foster a marketplace for middleware," said Ken Klingenstein, director of the Internet2 middleware initiative. "While the focus of the NMI is to support research and education, the consequences of this work could be far broader." NCSA's Randy Butler compared the NMI and its expected impact to the original NSFnet, the high-performance network that first connected the NSF supercomputer centers in the 1980s. "NSFnet allowed researchers around the country to begin to build and strengthen collaborations because they could easily share information," said Butler. "NMI will allow researchers to go beyond simple information sharing and enable true virtual teaming." The GRIDS Center will have two main functions: developing and integrating an NMI architecture and packaging, testing, and supporting NMI software distributions. The Internet2 team will develop an NMI architecture that focuses on inter-realm directories, security, and naming and will integrate these services into a variety of key applications, including desktop video. The team will also promote widespread, consistent, and rapid deployment of these technologies to the higher education and research communities.