The Globus Toolkit Gary Jackson

Introduction The Globus Toolkit is a product of the Globus Alliance ( It is middleware for developing grids The current release is 3.2, and the 4.0 release is forthcoming

Services Provided Infrastructure (MDS, Web services) Security  (GSI, CAS, etc.) Data Grid  (GridFTP, RFT, RLS) Computational Grid  (GRAM)

Services Provided: Infrastructure Web-services based infrastructure  At a low level, grid services are web services  Additionally, statefulness added with the Web Services: Resource Framework (WSRF) in the Globus Toolkit 4.0 (GT4) Monitoring and Discovery System (MDS)  For finding resources in a grid

Services Provided: Security Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) for authentication  X.509 with proxy certificates (RFC3820) Web-service interfaces for authentication and authorization Community Authorization Service  Web-services based authorization service

Services Provided: Data Grid GridFTP  Efficient, non-web-service based protocol for data transfer Replica Location Service (RLS)  Efficient distributed service for enumerating the locations of file replicas Reliable File Transfer (RFT)  Service for reliably managing file transfers

Services Provided: Computational Grids Grid Resource Allocation Manager  Resource identification and job execution From other parties  Condor-G  Community Scheduler Framework

Implemented Standards and Protocols GSI (RFC3820) for secure authentication W3C draft standards for web services (WS: Resource Framework, WS: Addressing, etc.)

Metadata No direct support with the distribution We’ve used the Metadata Catalog Service (MCS) before to manage metadata in a data grid

Maturity The Globus Toolkit has been around for many years However, the transition to web services has been rocky: GT3 is based on extensions to web services that were not widely accepted This should stabilize with the release of GT4

Support From the Globus Alliance and the Globus community  Manuals  Mailing lists  Good tutorial on development from Borja Sotomayor (

Support Commercial Support from Platform Computing (  Supported distribution of GT3  Enhanced support for job scheduling on a grid (for computational grids)

Globus Licensing Globus is covered under the Globus Toolkit Public License (GTPL 2) This is a very open license that allows modification and redistribution in source or binary form for any party, with some stipulations about further licensing and advertisement It also extends patent licensing

Future Plans There have been several GT4 alpha releases, including one scheduled for January 31 st The GT4 beta is due on March of this year The GT4 final release is due in April of this year