The open source Globus Toolkit is gaining acceptance as a de-facto standard for grid computing.
The technology giants at the forefront of distributed computing - IBM, Sun Microsystems and Compaq among them - are all working with Globus, which was developed by USC's Information Sciences Institute and Argonne National Laboratory.
IBM's August announcement of a major Grid initiative based on Globus technologies thrust Grid technology and the six-year-old Globus project into the spotlight.
The list of companies working with Globus is a long one: Compaq, Cray, SGI, Sun Microsystems, Veridian, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC plan to adopt the Globus Toolkit and develop an optimized form of it for their platforms, and Entropia, IBM, Microsoft, and Platform Computing are also working with Globus.
IBM and Platform plan to distribute the Toolkit and provide commercial support, according to the Globus Project. Microsoft is funding Argonne National Laboratory to exploit advanced Windows features. Entropia and Veridian are incorporating support for Globus protocols into their enterprise software. Compaq, Cray, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sun Microsystems, and SGI are porting the software and developing advanced interfaces to their own software. All participants will contribute modifications to the Globus Toolkit open source code base.
The collaborations are part of the Globus Project's new Industrial Grid Program, which facilitates a variety of industrial porting and support models for the Globus Toolkit.
The Toolkit is an "open-architecture, open-source set of protocols, services, and tools that address central problems in Grid computing - the secure, scalable, and coordinated sharing and use of resources in dynamic, multi-institutional 'virtual organizations,'" according to Globus Project documents. Globus Project leads include Argonne's Ian Foster and Steven Tuecke and ISI's Carl Kesselman.
National Science Foundation Signs On
In addition to commercial efforts, Globus has made a number of inroads with government and scientific organizations in recent months, particularly with the important U.S. National Science Foundation.
On September 24, the National Science Foundation announced a $12.1 million "NSF Middleware Initiative" building on Globus. According to an NSF spokesman, "Much as the NSFnet network established in 1985 laid the groundwork for the dramatic success of the Internet, we expect this NSF Middleware Initiative to lay foundations for the Grid, and spur adoption of the advanced services that will define the networks and distributed systems of tomorrow."
On August 27, NSF announced a $10 million grant to create a national virtual "collaboratory" to allow engineers to share equipment, data and research tools in order to create better techniques to safeguard structures against earthquakes. It will use Globus technology and the Globus partners will be co-investigators.
Globus will also play a key role in the recently announced NSF Distributed Terascale Facility, which will put in place 13.6 Teraflops of computing, based on Itanium clusters connected by a 40 gigabit per second network.
The U.S. Department of Energy last summer announced the investment of around $30 million to researchers including the Globus partners to conduct R&D aimed at creating "national collaboratories" in support of climate, high energy physics, fusion, and other science disciplines.
The European Union and U.K. eScience program also recently announced a suite of
Grid projects that build on Globus technologies.
According to a paper authored by Argonne's Foster, the Globus Toolkit includes software for security, information infrastructure, resource management, data management, communication, fault detection, and portability. It is packaged as a set of components that can be used either independently or together to develop Grid applications and programming tools.
Globus Toolkit components include:
- The Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI), which provides a single-sign-on, run-anywhere authentication service, with support for delegation of credentials to subcomputations, local control over authorization, and mapping from global to local user identities;
- The Grid Resource Access and Management (GRAM) protocol and service, which provides remote resource allocation and process creation, monitoring, and management services;
- The Metacomputing Directory Service (MDS), an extensible Grid information service that provides a uniform framework for discovering and accessing system configuration and status information such as compute server configuration, network status, or the locations of replicated datasets;
- Data Grid-specific technologies include a replica catalog, GridFTP, a high-speed data movement protocol, and reliable replica management tools. For each of these components, the Toolkit both defines protocols and APIs and provides open source reference implementations in C and, in most cases, Java. A variety of higher-level services can be, and have been, implemented in terms of these basic components.
The Project plans or has made a dozen enhancements to the Toolkit.
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