NMI: Disseminating and Supporting Middleware Infrastructure: Engaging and Expanding Scientific Grid Communities

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

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 standards and industry, building on strong corporate relationships. This proposal stresses dissemination and support of this national middleware, with emphasis on outreach to scientific communities. Specific goals of this proposal are to: 1) Develop and deploy scalable federated support, bug tracking, and software delivery services. 2) Improve the quality of the software releases, support, and training. 3) Outreach to the community with the goals of ensuring that early adopter user communities are successful and that new user communities are entrained in the use of the infrastructure. 4) Leverage the PIs' long history in running production facilities to develop tools and procedures to ensure that the resulting software is acceptable, deployable and supportable in a wide variety of environments. The proposed activities have significant intellectual merit and will bring broad benefits to society at large. The GRIDS leadership and staff are well qualified, having established leadership in the development and deployment of Grid middleware. These activities are on the cutting edge, yet they have real and immediate implications for technology users in the research/education domain, and beyond. The broader impact of GRIDS Center has already been considerable, with more than a dozen leading companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle having committed to building on our technology for their Grid products. GC2 will see even greater emphasis on these outreach efforts, centering on the emergent OGSA standards that are being driven by the GRIDS leadership.