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

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

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 applications The 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.