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

该提案的重点是设计和构建NSF中间件计划（NMI），并将成为两个系统集成商之一。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，并将加快部署和使用互联网上的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公共网络服务和资源（中间件），以优化应用程序的网络，并共享有限的资源，以实现所有用户的共同利益。 该提案将以开放的可扩展结构为基础，借鉴全球资源信息数据库活动（主要是Globus）和其他中间件技术的成功经验。 该项目将增强和扩展这种架构，以更大的研究社区，并有三个主要目标：定义一个集成的，模块化的，可扩展的网格架构，解决了很大一部分的当前和未来的中间件需求的科学和工程界，以及更大的学术界。实例化NMI架构，创建健壮、经过测试、打包和记录的中间件解决方案，以满足这些需求的重要部分，并在未来几年内涉及社区扩展以满足其他需求。与中间件研究社区合作，发展架构并将选定的组件集成到NMI中间件基础设施中。在构建NMI时，ISI将建立在广泛使用的研究中间件基础上，例如Globus Toolkit（网格环境的事实标准）、Condor和存储资源代理，充分利用开放（例如，IETF和W3C标准）协议，以及由独立研究人员和社区开发的中间件。该项目的成果将依赖于开放协议、开放源代码实施和互操作性。在开展这些活动时，ISI将与美国的主要项目密切合作，包括NSF PACIs，这将有助于我们接触其他用户社区，以及UCAID，它致力于与ISI合作，以解决与校园基础设施和更广泛的学术科学和研究社区整合的挑战性和重要问题。 ISI还将与NSF确定的其他国际用户社区合作，帮助将相关技术转化为标准和产品，并发展行业关系。

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.