Deploying and Supporting a National Middleware Infrastructure: Toward a National GRIDS Center

该提案侧重于NSF中间件计划(NMI)的部署和支持，旨在作为NMI计划的服务提供商。NMI计划将加快中间件功能和服务的开发，以支持国家研究和科学界，并将加快在互联网上部署和使用新的和新兴的应用程序。NMI计划的目的是使高级网络社区的成员能够合作开发和组装共同的网络服务和资源(中间件)，以优化应用网络，并为所有用户的共同利益共享有限的资源。-提供生产质量的软件版本、支持、培训和推广，目标是确保早期采用者用户社区取得成功，并对新用户社区进行基础设施使用方面的培训。-利用PI在运行生产设施方面的长期历史来开发工具和程序，以确保所产生的软件在各种终端系统上是可接受、可部署和可支持的，包括校园和实验室的生产环境。-提供专门的运营能力，为基础设施元素提供24x7全天候支持，监控电网基础设施，以及捕获和分析电网使用数据。通过这样做，NMI将能够构建一个全国性的基础设施，可供NEES和GriPhyN等应用程序社区、特定学科的社区或研究社区使用，以探索在全面、有意义的应用程序中使用中间件基础设施。该计划将建立在广泛使用的研究中间件的基础上，例如网格环境的事实标准Globus工具包、秃鹰和存储资源代理，并大量利用开放(例如，IETF和W3C标准)协议。该项目的结果将依赖于开放协议和开放源码实现。在开展这些活动时，NCSA将与包括NSF Pacis在内的美国主要项目密切合作，这将有助于接触其他用户社区，并与UCAID密切合作，UCAID致力于解决与校园基础设施以及更大的教育和研究社区整合这一具有挑战性的重要问题。NCSA将积极支持互操作性，将相关技术转化为标准，并发展强大的行业关系。

The proposal focuses on the deployment and support of the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) and is designed to serve as the Service Provider for the NMI program. The NMI program will expedite the development of middleware functions and services to support the national research and scientific community, and will also accelerate the deployment and use of new and emerging applications across the Internet. The purpose of the NMI program is to enable members of the advanced networking community to collaborate in developing and assembling common network services and resources (middleware) to optimize the network for applications and to share limited resources for the common good of all users.This proposal has three primary goals;- Provide production-quality software releases, support, training, and outreach, with the goals of ensuring that early adopter user communities are successful and that new user communities are trained in the use of the infrastructure.- Leverage the PI's long history in running production facilities to develop tools and procedures to ensure that the resulting software is acceptable, deployable and supportable on a wide variety of end systems, including production environments at campus and laboratories.- Provide dedicated operations capability providing 24x7 support for infrastructure elements, monitoring of grid infrastructure, and capture and analysis of grid usage data. In doing so, NMI will enable the construction of a national scale infrastructure that can be used by application communities such as NEES and GriPhyN, or discipline-specific communities, or research communities, to explore the use of the middleware infrastructure on full scale, meaningful applicationsThe program will will build on widely used research middleware, such as the Globus Toolkit, the de facto standard for Grid environments, Condor, and Storage Resource Broker, heavily leveraging open (e.g., IETF and W3C standard) protocols. The results of the project will rely on open protocols and open source implementations. In undertaking these activities, NCSA will work closely with major U.S. projects including the NSF PACIs, which will help reach out to other user communities, and with UCAID, which has committed to working to address the challenging and important problem of integration with campus infrastructures and the larger education and research communities. NCSA will work aggressively to support interoperability, transition relevant technologies to standards, and develop strong industrial relationships.