The Globus Project has become the "Globus Alliance" by adding members from Scotland and Sweden, the open source Grid project announced.
Like the Globus Project, the Globus Alliance will be "a tightly integrated consortium dedicated to collaborative design, development, testing, and support of the open source Globus Toolkit, the de facto standard Grid software," the new Alliance announced.
The Globus Project was established in 1995 by Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and the University of Chicago. New Globus Alliance partners are the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the Swedish Center for Parallel Computers (PDC), which contribute database-integration and security expertise, respectively.
Also, a new Academic Affiliates program, with participation from Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the U.S., recognizes major contributions to the Globus Toolkit by key members of the academic and research communities, which gain a formal voice in Globus Alliance governance with the creation of a new advisory council.
"We are delighted to announce this transition to the Globus Alliance, with its two new partners and Affiliates program," said Ian Foster, member of the new Globus Alliance governing board, associate director of Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science division, and professor in the University of Chicago Computer Science department. "This important step recognizes the international scope of the Globus community, brings exciting new technical capabilities, and expands the set of people who, like us, live and breathe Globus technologies."
The Globus Alliance's new governing board is structured to continue the tradition of community engagement and careful design, the Alliance said. In addition to Foster, other members include Malcolm Atkinson and Mark Parsons of Edinburgh and Olle Mulmo and Lennart Johnsson at PDC, who join longtime Globus participants Carl Kesselman and Karl Czajkowski of ISI and Steven Tuecke of Argonne. The new board takes on ultimate responsibility for Globus Toolkit design and governance.
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center developers and staff from the National e-Science Center at Edinburgh play a leading role in the Global Grid Forum Database Access and Integration Services (DAIS) working group that is writing specifications for this important Grid area, the Alliance said. The EPCC developers are the primary implementers of a reference implementation, OGSA-DAI, funded by the UK e-Science Grid Core Program. Founded in 1990, and with more than 60 staff members, EPCC has a long history of working with industry and public bodies in collaborative projects at the leading edge of computational research and development, the Alliance said.
Founded in 1989, PDC is the main center for high-performance computing and visualization for the Swedish academic community. It has a record of successful early adoption of new technology for high-end users and extensive experience in developing and deploying security solutions and system administration tools in open environments. It co-founded the European Grid Support Center and the Nordic Grid Consortium, and is an active body in the European Grid research community, the Alliance said.
U.S. partners in the Globus Alliance continue to be funded by federal sponsors such as the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Industry sponsors include IBM and Microsoft Research.
"The time is right to expand the partnership to embrace new expertise and to advance Globus as a responsive, high-quality open source community for Grid infrastructure," said Carl Kesselman, director of the Center for Grid Technology at ISI.
The new Globus Academic Affiliates program recognizes major contributions to the Globus Toolkit by other organizations, as contributors or users. The first affiliates are, in Europe, CERN, the lead partner of the EU DataGrid project, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center; in Asia-Pacific, Monash University in Australia, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology's Grid Technology and Research Center in Japan; and in the U.S., the University of Wisconsin's Condor group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center, Indiana University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara.
gridMathematica Gets a Boost from Mathematica 5
Wolfram Research says it has significantly increased the performance of its Grid computing application with the release of gridMathematica 1.1.
gridMathematica now includes Mathematica 5, the new high-performance version of Wolfram's leading technical computing software, the company says. The update delivers large performance gains in dense numerical linear algebra, support for sparse numerical linear algebra, large-scale linear programming, arbitrary precision computation, and interprocess communication speed, Wolfram says.
gridMathematica is a parallel computing solution for dedicated Grids or clusters. It offers a cost-effective way of deploying Mathematica for parallel computations. gridMathematica can run on any cluster of machines, including Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and requires only TCP/IP connectivity, the company says. Version 1.1 capitalizes on a new TCP/IP protocol in Mathematica 5 that allows it to communicate at the speed of the underlying network. On most standard networks, this means that users will see bandwidth improvements of a factor of 10 and latency improvements of a factor of 200. On faster networks, the gains are even higher, the company claims.
With gridMathematica, simple commands such as ParallelEvaluate, ParallelTable, and ParallelMap can be used to quickly parallelize sequential codes or develop parallel applications from scratch, Wolfram says. gridMathematica supports all common parallel computing constructs such as virtual shared memory, distributed memory, automatic or explicit process scheduling, explicit concurrency primitives, and failure recovery of stranded processes.
Abbas Debuts Grid Web Site, Book
Grid computing analyst Ahmar Abbas of Grid Technology Partners has launched a new Web site on Grid computing called Gridblog. Abbas has also published a new book on Grid computing that includes contributions from industry leaders.
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