GRIDS Center stands for Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support Center. The latest software release from GRIDS is in NMI-R4, issued in December 2003 by the NSF Middleware Initiative. GRIDS looks like a good place for anyone contemplating or installing a Grid based system.
The GRIDS Center is a Support Center for Grid systems according to their web site. They have sections for GRIDS Essentials, Training and Support, News and Outreach, and Downloads. The latest events are posted on the home page. All in all, this looks like an essential site if you are planning or using a grid system.
From the NSF Site:
The current version is NMI-R3.2, a maintenance release issued on October 9, 2003. It includes new versions of GSI-OpenSSH, MyProxy, gsi_openssl, and new bits for everything that depends on gsi_openssl. Details available in the 3.2 release notes.
NMI-R3 comprises sixteen software packages from the GRIDS Center and NMI-EDIT teams, online services, directory schema, conventions and best practices, architecture documents, and policies. You can explore each of these by selecting Components on the menu bar above.
April 28, 2003 -- The National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI) today issued its third release of software tools carefully chosen for their value and ability to interoperate as part of the emerging NSF cyberinfrastructure for 21st century science and engineering. Available free to the public at http://www.nsf-middleware.org/, NMI-R3 has components developed at universities and national laboratories, designed to fill functions needed by the research and education community such as user authentication and authorization, resource identification and allocation, job management, and scheduling.
NSF supports two primary NMI teams: The EDIT Consortium (for "Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies") and the GRIDS Center (for "Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support"). EDIT develops tools, practices and architectures to leverage campus infrastructures to facilitate multi-institutional collaboration. NMI-R3 includes four new EDIT components -- LOOK, SAGE, Enterprise Directory Implementation Roadmap, and Permis -- which support directory performance monitoring, group management, and service deployment as well as inter-institutional authorization. Also updated for NMI-R3 is Shibboleth, an architecture and suite of software used for accessing customized or restricted content and services while protecting privacy.
NSF's ambitious Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), which includes the TeraGrid, is creating a distributed computational infrastructure that requires the stable, thoroughly tested software being designed by GRIDS. "Robust software is essential to production deployment and national use," said Dan Reed, an ETF project principal investigator, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and project director for NEESgrid, the $10 million system integration project for the NSF-supported George E. Brown, Jr. National Earthquake Engineering System (NEES). "There is no doubt that the GRIDS Centers software packages have reduced TeraGrid's deployment time, and I also know that NEESgrid has leveraged GRIDS components to reduce development time and simplify engagement with that community."
Full Announcement: http://www.npaci.edu/online/v7.9/nmi.html
For more information, see http://www.grids-center.org and http://www.nmi-edit.org.
Useful Web Sites:
NSF Home Page: http://www.nsf.gov
News Highlights: http://www.nsf.gov/home/news.html
Newsroom: http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/media/start.htm
Science Statistics: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/stats.htm
Awards Searches: http://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/a6/A6Start.htm
See also: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/general/news/hipcat_111802.php
See also: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/general/news/ud_120902.php
Platform Computing Inc. and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) announced that they will collaborate on research and development of next-generation software technologies for grid computing.
This partnership will focus deployment and use of scientific applications and experiments on grids. The University of Texas at Austin is the largest university in the US, and TACC is building a university-wide UT Grid that will connect the myriad of clusters, workstations, visualization systems, and storage devices of researchers and departments to TACC's high-end facilities.
Platform LSF and Platform MultiCluster are viewed as key technologies for enabling researchers to share HPC resources and to execute codes that span multiple HPC systems
Together, Platform and TACC plan to work on various joint initiatives including:
NSF Middleware Initiative Release 2.0
NMI-R2 is now in official release, featuring the GRIDS Center Software Suite and NMI-EDIT Components. It integrates key software packages, standards, and best practices for science, engineering, and education. Downloads are free to the public. Starting with R2, NMI will issue releases every six months -- in October and April -- to provide the stable, predictable middleware infrastructure that the community has identified as an important need.
The Middleware site covers:
The National Science Foundation has issued a press release describing real-world applications of NMI middleware. NMI recently announced that eight universities are participating in a closely coordinated effort to deploy and evaluate the initiative's middleware. Visit our subscriptions page and join one or more mail lists to get more out of NMI. You can discuss our open-source software, get technical support, sign up for press releases and more.
Here is a list of NMI Release 2 Components:
Grid Center Software Suite
NMI-EDIT Components
IBM Grid Helps Fight Against Breast Cancer
IBM, in conjunction with Oxford University has built a massive computing grid for breast cancer screening and diagnosis - enabling for the first time, comparative analysis of digitized mammographies, software enhanced screening, and collaboration on a grand scale.
NPACI Institutions
Awarded $2M Grant from Department of Energy
for Grid Web Services
NSF's $35 Million Extensible Terascale Facility
Award Expands TeraGrid Projects
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the first alpha release of version 2.0 of the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) software.
VMI is a middleware communication layer that addresses the issues of availability, usability, and management in the context of large-scale system-area networks interconnected over wide-area computational grids. In effect, VMI makes it possible to run applications on clusters of computers distributed at multiple sites and that use different types of interconnects to communicate among processors.
Features of VMI 2.0 include: Support for multiple communication interconnects including shared memory TCP/IP, Myrinet (GM), and VIA on multi-processor machines. Support for the industry standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallel computing API. This allows many existing codes to run in a cluster environment simply by recompiling. Binary portability of MPI applications across interconnects without requiring recompilation of application software.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center, a world leader in developing and applying computing technology to advance science, and Entropia, Inc., the leading provider of PC grid computing solutions, announced today early success with their partnership to provide industry-leading distributed computing capabilities to computational science and engineering projects at SDSC. With its successful deployment of Entropia's DCGrid, a powerful and cost-effective PC grid computing platform that provides high-performance computing capabilities by aggregating the unused processing cycles of existing Windows-based PCs, SDSC has begun taking advantage of a previously untapped computational power, enabling new biological and molecular research that was previously impossible.
All content on this site is Copyright 2001 and 2002 by Bill Nicholls