Globus Project Releases First Major Software Implementation of Grid Services Architecture

Published 07/17/2003

This week's official release of the Globus Toolkit, 3.0 (GT3) is a milestone in the evolution of Grid computing, which lets people share computing power, databases, and other tools securely online across corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy. GT3 is the first full-scale implementation of Grid software compliant with the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) version 1.0, a new specification that the Globus Project played a key role in defining.

Previous versions of the Globus Toolkit have become central to hundreds of science and engineering projects on the Grid, including those of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). The Globus Toolkit also has been adopted for commercial offerings by major information technology companies. The toolkit's open-source software and services have transformed the way on-line resources are shared across organizations.

OGSI is part of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) developed through the Global Grid Forum (GGF) to define Grid services, which are Web services that conform to a specific set of conventions. OGSI specifies a set of "service primitives" that, rather than stipulating precise services, instead establish a nucleus of behavior common to all Grid/Web services that can be leveraged by meta- and system-level services. GT3 uses this specification to provide powerful tools for resource monitoring, discovery, management, security, and file transfer.

"GT3 represents a shift of the widely used Globus Toolkit from a de facto standard to an actual standard. By building on top of industry-standard Web services, GT3 not only provides a transition path for existing GT2 applications, but also enables entirely new types of Grid applications," said Carl Kesselman, research associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California School of Engineering, director of the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) Center for Grid Technologies, and Chief Software Architect of NPACI.

"We hope this will be remembered as the day Grid computing began to come of age," said Ian Foster, associate division director for mathematics and computer science at Argonne National Laboratory and professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. "GT3 is significant because it shows how OGSI can be used to implement Grid services for real-world applications using standard Web services tooling. The community of developers is expanding rapidly thanks to these standards, with useful new tools emerging from research in the public and private sectors. We believe GT3 provides the foundation for many new Grid applications."

Foster and Kesselman are co-leaders of the Globus Project, together with Steve Tuecke, the lead architect of the Globus Project at Argonne's Distributed Systems Laboratory. The Globus Project is based at Argonne, ISI, and the University of Chicago.

Partners of the Globus Project include the UK e-Science Program and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, both of which contributed to development of GT3. IBM and Platform Computing are also providing code for GT3. Globus Project sponsors include the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, IBM, and Microsoft.

Leading Grid participants have previously committed to use of GT3 and OGSA. Companies include Avaki, Cray, Entropia, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, Platform Computing, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Veridian. Research projects include the NSF's TeraGrid, the Department of Energy Science Grid, FusionGrid, the Grid Physics Network, the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory, and the NSF Middleware Initiative.

"The Internet is about getting computers to talk together; Grid computing is about getting computers to work together," said Tom Hawk, IBM's general manager of Grid computing. "The introduction of the Globus Toolkit 3.0 with the Open Grid Services Architecture is an important step in moving Grid computing beyond the laboratories of academia and research and through the doors of commercial enterprises. Grids will help elevate the Internet to a true computing platform, combining the qualities of service of enterprise computing with the ability to share heterogeneous distributed resources - everything from applications and data to storage and servers."

The Globus Toolkit received a 2002 R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine, which further honored the toolkit as 2002's "Most Promising New Technology." InfoWorld magazine has just named the project's leaders among its Top Ten Innovators of 2003, and the Federal Laboratory Consortium gave the Globus Project its 2003 Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer.

To download GT3, see http://www.globus.org/toolkit/. For more information about Globus, see http://www.globus.org/ or contact Tom Garritano, <garritano@mcs.anl.gov>, 630-252-7641 (office).