Designing and Building a National Middleware Infrastructure: Towards a National GRIDS Center

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The proposal focuses on designing and building the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI), and will be one of two System Integrators. 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. The proposal will be based on an open extensible architecture by building on the success of the GRID activities (primarily Globus) and other middleware technologies. The project would enhance and extend this architecture to the larger research community and has three primary goals;Define an integrated, modular, and extensible Grid architecture addressing a large fraction of current and projected future middleware requirements for the scientific and engineering communities, as well as the larger academic communities. Instantiate the NMI architecture, creating robust, tested, packaged, and documented middleware solutions that address a significant fraction of these requirements, and that involve community extensions over the next several years to address other requirements.Work with middleware research community and to evolve the architecture and to integrate selected components into the NMI middleware infrastructure.In constructing the NMI, ISI 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, as well as middleware which is being developed by independent researchers and communities. The results of the project will rely on open protocols, open source implementations and interoperability. In undertaking these activities, ISI will work closely with major U.S. projects including the NSF PACIs, which will help us to reach out to other user communities, and UCAID, which has committed to working with ISI to address the challenging and important problem of integration with campus infrastructures and the broader academic science and research communities. ISI will also work with other international users communities as identified by NSF, will help transition relevant technologies to standards and products, and will develop industrial relationships.