NMI: Designing and Building a National Middleware Infrastructure (NMI-2)

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In 2001, the Grid Research, Integration, Development and Support (GRIDS) Center was established to define, develop, deploy, and support an integrated national middleware infrastructure. This proposal seeks to extend this work to (1) broaden the scope and capabilities of the middleware delivered; (2) embrace and extend emerging Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) standards; (3) expand the range of communities supported; and (4) establish international consensus in middleware. GRIDS Center 2 (GC2), like GC1, will rely heavily on open protocols, and open source implementations, and will work closely with major U.S. projects including the NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC), and Internet2 to reach out to other user communities and to address integration with campus infrastructures. The proposal details a strategy to aggressively transition relevant technologies to standardsand industry, building on strong corporate relationships.This proposal stresses the definition of the NMI architecture and the integration of extant middleware solutions into this architecture. Specific goals of this proposal are to:* define a scalable robust middleware architecture leveraging the standards-based Open Grid Services Architecture.* create mechanisms and infrastructure for combining middleware components from a range of sources into integrated, supportable middleware software releases at least twice a year.* based on requirements of the NMI user communities, create integrated OGSA-based services packages that provide focused functionality in areas such as data, computation management, and teleinstrumentation. These packages will integrate software from many NMI development groups.Regarding NSF merit review criteria, our proposal has intellectual significance and broad benefits for society. GRIDS leadership and staff have established reputations in designing and deploying middleware. These R&D activities have real, immediate implications in the research, education and beyond. GRIDS impact has already been considerable, with over a dozen companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle committed to building products on GRIDS technology. GC2 will see even greater emphasis on theseoutreach efforts, centering on emergent OGSA standards that are being driven by the GRIDS leadership..