NMI Release 8 Now
Available
Grid and federated identity management software and
resources ease the use and development of research tools for the
advancement of science and engineering
October 18, 2005 - Working with research
communities to provide development and access management tools for
Grid and other research environments, the eighth release of the
National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI-R8) helps
to facilitate the complex resource management and security
required in a shared cyberinfrastructure. NMI-R8 is available to
the public for downloading under open-source licenses at the NMI
website.
NMI-R8 marks two important "firsts" for the NMI
program: the addition and integration of Ninf-G, the first non-
U.S. developed component included in the GRIDS Center software
suite; and GridShib, the first software enabling interoperability
between the Globus(r) Toolkit and Shibboleth(r) federating
software.
Ninf-G is a GridRPC reference implementation
developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science
and Technology in Japan. "Tanaka-san and the co-developers of Ninf-G
are very active in both the Global Grid Forum's GridRPC group and
PRAGMA (Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly).
GGF drives Grid Standards and PRAGMA provides a collaborative
environment for an international group of scientists to
practically apply grid technologies to their applications by
sharing software and experiences." said Philip Papadopoulos,
Program Director, Grid and Cluster Computing at San Diego
Supercomputer Center. "Through PRAGMA, we learned how researchers
in Japan and Asia Pacific were making productive use of Ninf-G and
believed that this could be very useful software for the NSF
Middleware audience. With the integration of Ninf-G into the GRIDS
Center stack, we're also learning about the practical issues of
sharing and supporting software across borders and languages and
see this activity as an important pilot study."
Another featured component, GridShib, enables
interoperability between the Globus Toolkit and Shibboleth
federating software. Using this package, researchers who are
members of both brick-and-mortar institutions and Globus-enabled
virtual organizations can use their local campus credentials to
access their distributed Grid-based resources. GridShib is
included in the NMI-EDIT release.
Additional NMI-EDIT components include the new
Enterprise Authentication Implementation Roadmap, a process and
set of recommendations for readying institutional authentication
infrastructures for use in federations and other
inter-organizational trust relationships. New software versions
are available for both the Signet and PERMIS privilege management
systems and the Grouper group management tools. NMI-R8 comprises a
total of fourteen updated NMI-EDIT tools, software packages,
practice documents, and schema that support institutional and
federated identity management environments.
The current release of the GRIDS Center software
suite includes binary packages for ten Unix-like platforms and
features updated versions of Condor-G, Globus Toolkit, MyProxy,
GridPort, pyGlobus, UberFTP and gx-map. Like the previous release,
NMI-R8 includes two versions of the Storage Resource Broker
Client: the latest available, and a TeraGrid-compatible version.
The stack is flexible because the components are bundled together
as one easy-to-deploy package. Once installed, only the parts of
interest need to be configured.
The latest release from another NMI systems
integrator team, the Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE)
consortium, provides a JSR 168-compliant portal platform and
supports the GRIDS Center Software Suite via integration with the
WSRF based on GT4. OGCE builds on the Grid-service specifications
to enable the creation of Grid portals or Web-based user
interfaces that simplify the process of identifying and accessing
Grid resources.
In September 2001, the first NMI systems integrator
teams, GRIDS Center and NMI-EDIT, began work along with a number
of smaller development awards. Along with the continued funding of
its original teams, the OGCE, the Common Instrument Middleware
Architecture (CIMA) team, and several new experimental projects
were added in 2003. After eight releases of software, tools, and
practices, NMI is at the leading edge of the growing
cyberinfrastructure established to support next generation science
and engineering.
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Media Contacts:
Ann West (906-487-1726,
awest@educause.edu), NMI-EDIT
For more information:
NMI-EDIT Consortium: http://www.nmi-edit.org
OGCE Team: http://www.collab-ogce.org/nmi/index.jsp
CIMA Team: http://www.instrumentmiddleware.org/
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