Gridbus Project Releases Grid Accounting Services Architecture
October 3, 2002
By Paul Shread
SDSC researcher Bing Zhu worked with William Allcock and Joseph Link of
the Globus Project to implement the SRB driver functions. "Our work
enables the SRB software to talk to GridFTP servers to both upload to
and download files from any storage system supported by GridFTP," said
Zhu. Having previously integrated the Globus Grid Security Interface, or
GSI, into the SRB, DAKS researchers are now working with the Globus team
to develop software that allows both systems to talk with each other.
The widely accepted GridFTP data transfer protocol is based on FTP, the
popular Internet file transfer protocol. Integrating SRB with GridFTP
will significantly expand the number of different systems users can
connect to, as well as providing users with greater flexibility.
According to Zhu, users of GridFTP for file transfer will now be able to
use the SRB for storage management, and users of GridFTP for storage
management will be able to use the SRB for file transfer.
SRB is a client-server middleware that provides a uniform interface for
connecting to heterogeneous data resources over a network and accessing
replicated data sets. SRB is highly scalable, and thus capable of
handling scientific data sets as they continue to grow larger. Both the
size of data collections (tens of terabytes) and the number of files
(millions) can be very large. As the number of files increases, they can
be organized into "containers," or sets of files, with related files
stored in the same container for faster access.
SRB, in conjunction with the Metadata Catalog (MCAT), provides a way to
access data sets and resources based on their attributes rather than
their names or physical locations. The MCAT server stores meta data
associated with data sets, users and resources managed by the SRB. MCAT
meta data includes information for access control, and the data
structures required for implementing "collection" (directory)
abstraction. Because the MCAT is implemented with relational database
technology, it can be extended beyond the capability of the traditional
file system to provide a more complex access control system, proxy
operations, and information discovery based on system and application
level meta data. For more information about SRB, please visit
http://www.sdsc.edu/DICE/SRB/index.html.
GridFTP is a high-performance, secure and reliable data transfer
protocol based on FTP that is optimized for high-bandwidth wide-area
networks and provides the following protocol features: GSI security on
control and data channels; multiple data channels for parallel
transfers; partial file transfers; third-party (direct server-to-server)
transfers; authenticated data channels; and reusable data channels. A
major feature of GridFTP is its reliability and ability to restart
transfers that fail without re-transmitting already-received data.
GridFTP is also being integrated with High Performance Storage System
(HPSS), a major storage system that SRB interacts with, to make GridFTP
a native access protocol for HPSS. The Globus data grid software is
available in the Globus Toolkit 2.0 release at http://www.globus.org.
Add www.gridcomputingplanet.com to your favorites Add www.gridcomputingplanet.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.xReceive news via our XML/RSS feed
Images
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
