University of Arkansas
Amy Apon (PI), David Merrifield (co-PI & President of ARKnet) The University of Arkansas is well positioned to begin a middleware implemention such as NMI-EDIT. UAF currently utilizes SunOne (iPlanet) Directory Server to provide a central LDAP directory for the campus. This directory receives automated updates through metadirectory software developed locally to populate and update entries from our business and student information systems. UAF already utilizes the directory for authentication of key open systems in our central computing facility, plus UAF has coordinated with other colleges and departments within the university to do the same with a number of their servers. The same metadirectory also feeds a Microsoft Active Directory for the Windows environment. Computing Services offers its expertise in managing and operating the central LDAP and Active Directories, plus a limited amount of programmer time to make the necessary alterations to our current environment as might be required for a middleware project.

University of Missouri
Gordon Springer (co-PI & GPN Executive Council Member) The University of Missouri-Columbia currently utilizes a unified campus-wide authentication scheme based on Microsoft’s Active Directory and MIT’s Kerberos. Active Directory is used throughout the University to provide access to Microsoft Exchange and other administrative and academic services. In the future MU intends to bridge the campus and University authentication services to the evolving systems being developed on a national scale, such as NMI-EDIT and Shibboleth as well as the Grid computing environment. The MU intent is to provide a “seamless” transition between local and global authentication and authorization as well as resource sharing activities. It is vitally important that MU is able to actively participate nationally and globally and the use of middleware is critical in achieving this end.

University of Oklahoma Henry Neeman (co-PI), Dennis Aebersold Currently OU has engaged in the following middleware-related activities: (1) reduced the master account management database to a single Oracle database; (2) implemented standard LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory Services for user authentication and authorization. In addition, (3) OU is currently researching the deployment of a PKI and Shibboleth to augment current authentication and authorization infrastructure. The OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER), in cooperation with the Oklahoma High Energy Physics community, has led the OU campus in research middleware, having installed Globus, Condor-G, the Virtual Data Toolkit and related technologies. Under a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation grant, OSCER is about to deploy an Itanium2 cluster whose primary role will be as a development platform for Grid-enabled science and engineering applications.

South Dakota State University Delmar Johnson (co-PI & MIDnet Board Member) Middleware implementation at SDSU is in the early stages of development. While LDAP, and other identification and authentication directories and databases, have been available for several years at SDSU, the broad use of these resources for controlling access to computer resources has been limited. An Active Directory (AD) implementation, coordinated through Regents Information System with the other five South Dakota public universities, is nearly complete at SDSU. We will be investigating ways that this AD information resource might be further leveraged for identification, authentication and authorization (IAA). An Intranet at SDSU is being expanded to provide access to MIS and other university critical information and resources. Over the next one to two years, it is our goal to investigate and then integrate IAA into all aspects of this Intranet. SDSU has a supercomputer level cluster that will be shared with other research universities in the state. Middleware implementation for access to this and other supercomputing and grid computing in the region will be pursued.

Peter Kiewit InstituteHamid Sharif (co-PI) The Peter Kiewit Institute (Omaha, Nebraska) is home to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Engineering and Technology and the University of Nebraska at Omaha's College of Information Science and Technology. The Peter Kiewit Institute is designed to help meet the needs of the nation’s technology and engineering firms by providing a top-flight education to students interested in pursuing careers in information science, technology and engineering.