GRIDS Center Middleware OverviewSandra Redman

Information Technology and Systems Center

andInformation Technology Research

CenterNational Space Science and

Technology Center256-961-7806

sredman@itsc.uah.eduSandra.Redman@msfc.nasa.gov

www.itsc.uah.edu

National Middleware Initiative (NMI)

• Funded by NSF, NMI is developing and deploying a reusable, expandable set of middleware functions and services to benefit collaborative applications in a networked environment.

The GRIDS (Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support) Center is developing middleware for enabling grid applications.

The EDIT (Enterprise Desktop Integration Technologies) consortium is developing middleware for the enterprise environment.

• The work of these two teams is being integrated, in collaboration with federal agencies, universities, private industry, and standards organizations.

Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support (GRIDS)

Center• GRIDS team:

University of Southern California’s (USC) Information Sciences Institute (ISI)

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Chicago (U of C) San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University

of California-San Diego University of Wisconsin-Madison

• GRIDS Center objective:

“To define, develop, deploy, and support an integrated national middleware infrastructure supporting 21st century science and engineering applications”

GRIDS Center ComponentsNMI Release 2

Grid Packaging Tools - a collection of packaging tools built around an XML-based packaging data format to facilitate defining complex dependency and compatibility relationships between packages, provides a straight forward way to define complex dependency and compatibility relationships between packages.

NMI Client/Server Bundles - are an aggregate of all of the software components in the Grids Center Software Suite to ease installation and configuration of GRIDS tools; helps make installation and configuration easier for those who want to implement all or most of the technologies in this set

Grid Config Tools - a collection of configuration tools that manages the configuration for NMI software components

GRIDS Center ComponentsNMI Release 2

• Globus toolkit - an open source software toolkit and libraries for building grid applications

Grid Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM) processes the requests for resources for remote application execution, allocates the required resources, and manages the active jobs

Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS) provides the necessary tools to build an LDAP-based information infrastructure for computational grids

Grid Resource Information Service (GRIS) provides a uniform means of querying resources on a computational grid for their current configuration, capabilities, and status

Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) enables secure authentication and communication over an open network; based on public key encryption, X.509 certificates, and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) communication protocol

Grid FTP A high-performance, secure, robust data transfer mechanism Globus Replica Catalog A mechanism for maintaining a catalog of

dataset replicas Globus Replica Management A mechanism that ties together the

Replica Catalog and GridFTP technologies, allowing applications to create and manage replicas of large datasets

GRIDS Center ComponentsNMI Release 2

Condor-G - full-featured task broker to manage jobs destined to run on resources accessible via Globus gatekeepers

Network Weather Service - monitors and dynamically forecasts the performance various network and computational resources can deliver over a given time interval

KX.509/KCA - provide a bridge between a Kerberos and PKI infrastructure

GSI OpenSSH - a modified version of OpenSSH that adds support for GSI authentication, providing a single sign-on remote login capability for the Grid

Related Activities

• GGF (Global Grid Forum) - composed of representatives from 200 organizations and over 30 countries, facilitates and supports the creation and development of global computational grids and is developing standards and best practices for grid technologies and applications

• MAGIC (Middleware and Grid Infrastructure Coordination) – coordinates interagency efforts in grid and middleware and provides a federal voice for international efforts

Helpful Links

• NSF Middleware program – http://www.nsf-middleware.org

• NMI Testbed Site - http://www.nsf-middleware.org/testbed/

• GRIDS Center - http://www.grids-center.org/

• NMI-EDIT - http://www.nmi-edit.org/

• Global Grid Forum - http://www.gridforum.org/

• Globus - http://www.globus.org/