WASHINGTON, DC, April 28, 2003

Standards-based software and tools are adopted by e-science, Universities and industry

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"). NMI software is helping to remove traditional obstacles that hinder effective multi-institutional teamwork. For example, every university has local policies for identifying users while ensuring privacy and security. The tools provided by NMI can reconcile variations in policy and technology from campus to campus, while leaving control in the hands of local administrators, which eases the deployment of applications for grid computing and other forms of collaboration.

"The practice of science and engineering is being transformed by a new generation of integrated computing, information and communications tools," said Peter Freeman, NSF assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). "NMI activities ease the deployment of shared cybertools that are critical to NSF's plans for a cyberinfrastructure to advance scientific discovery, education and innovation in areas of considerable benefit to society."