NMI releases version 8

released October 18, 2005

The eighth release of the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI-R8) helps to facilitate the complex resource management and security required in a shared cyberinfrastructure. NMI-R8 is available for downloading under open-source licenses at http://www.nsf-middleware.org/.

NMI-R8 marks two important "firsts" for the NMI program: the addition and integration of Ninf-G, the first non-U.S. developed component included in the GRIDS Center software suite; and GridShib, the first software enabling interoperability between the Globus Toolkit and Shibboleth federating software. Ninf-G is a GridRPC referenced implementation developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan. Development of GridShib is led by NCSA with collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. Using GridShib, researchers who are members of both brick-and-mortar institutions and Globus-enabled virtual organizations can use their local campus credentials to access their distributed Grid-based resources. GridShib is included in the NMI-EDIT release.

Additional NMI-EDIT components include the new Enterprise Authentication Implementation Roadmap, a process and set of recommendations for readying institutional authentication infrastructures for use in federations and other interorganizational trust relationships. New software versions are available for both the Signet and PERMIS privilege management systems and the Grouper group management tools. NMI-R8 comprises 14 updated NMI-EDIT tools, software packages, practice documents, and schema that support institutional and federated identity management environments.

The current release of the GRIDS Center software suite includes binary packages for 10 Unix-like platforms and features updated versions of Condor-G, Globus Toolkit, MyProxy, GridPort, pyGlobus, UberFTP, and gx-map. Like the previous release, NMI-R8 includes two versions of the Storage Resource Broker Client: the latest available and a TeraGrid-compatible version. The stack is flexible because the components are bundled together as one easy-to-deploy package. Once installed, only the parts of interest need to be configured.

 

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