Globus Toolkit

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Globus Toolkit
Developed by	Globus Alliance
Latest release	4.0.6 / January 22, 2008
OS	Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, HP-UX and AIX.
Platform	PC
Genre	Grid computing
License	Apache license [1]
Website	http://www.globus.org/toolkit/

The Globus Toolkit, currently at version 4, is an open source toolkit for building computing grids developed and provided by the Globus Alliance.

Contents 1 Standards implementation 2 Compatible third-party software 2.1 Globus distributions 2.2 Job schedulers 3 External links

[edit] Standards implementation

The Globus Toolkit is an implementation of the following standards:

• Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)
• Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) -- originally intended to form the basic “plumbing” layer for OGSA, but has been superseded by WSRF and WS-Management.
• Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF)
• Job Submission Description Language (JSDL)
• Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA)
• WS-Management
• WS-BaseNotification
• SOAP
• WSDL
• Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI)

The Globus Toolkit has implementations of the OGF-defined protocols to provide:

1. Resource management: Grid Resource Allocation & Management Protocol (GRAM)
2. Information Services: Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS)
3. Security Services: Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI)
4. Data Movement and Management: Global Access to Secondary Storage (GASS) and GridFTP

[edit] Compatible third-party software

A number of tools can function with Globus Toolkit, including:

• WebCom and WebCom-G [2]
• Nimrod tools for meta-scheduling and parametric computing
• Gridbus Grid Service Broker
• Grid Portal Software such as GridPort, OGCE and GridSphere
• Grid Packaging Toolkit (GPT)
• MPICH-G2 (Grid Enabled MPI)
• Network Weather Service (NWS) (Quality-of-Service monitoring and statistics)
• Condor (CPU Cycle Scavenging) and Condor-G (Job Submission)
• HPC4U Middleware (Fault Tolerant and SLA aware Grid Middleware)
• GridWay metascheduler

XML-based web services offer a way to access the diverse services and applications in a distributed environment.

[edit] Globus distributions

In 2004 Univa Corporation began providing commercial support for the Globus Toolkit using a business model similar to that of Red Hat.

[edit] Job schedulers

GRAM (Grid Resource Allocation Manager), a component of the Globus Toolkit, officially supports the following job schedulers or batch-queuing systems:

• Portable Batch System, a computer software job scheduler that allocates network resources to batch jobs.
• Condor High-Throughput Computing System, a software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks.
• Load Sharing Facility, a commercial computer software job scheduler.

Unofficial job schedulers that can be used with the Globus Toolkit:

• Sun Grid Engine, an open source batch-queuing system, supported by Sun Microsystems. Globus does not officially support SGE, but third parties offer methods to integrate it:
  • The London e-Science Center has created a "Transfer-queue over Globus (TOG)" package and provides instructions on how to configure a Globus Toolkit 2 or 3 or a Globus Toolkit 4 server so that it can submit jobs for execution on a local Sun Grid Engine installation.
  • Other commercial solutions are available for integrating SGE into Globus Toolkit also.

[edit] External links

• Globus Toolkit homepage