Globus Toolkit Version 4: Status and Experiences

Scope and Content

Globus Toolkit version 4 (GT4), released on April 30 2005, represents a significant advance over earlier GT versions in terms of software quality, functionality, and standards conformance. This workshop will provide an opportunity for people not only to learn about GT4 but also to hear from groups working with it. Presentations at the workshop will focus in particular on experiences implementing and using the standards that underlie GT4 and that in many cases form the basis for ongoing discussions in OGSA-related working groups: the discussions of practical experiences with Web services standards in particular may provide a useful counterpoint to the often academic debates concerning the pros and cons of different approaches. The discussion of GT4 experiences should also be relevant to RGs concerned with Grid applications.

Additional details on GT4: Quality has been a major emphasis during the 18 month development period and in particular the 6 month alpa-beta period, in which over 150 people participated. Functionality includes not only the GridFTP data movement service, GRAM job submission and management service, Reliable File Transfer service, Replica Location Service, Community Authorization Service, OGSA Data Access and Integration, and MyProxy services included in previous releases (although with multiple-order-of-magnitude improvements in scalability in several cases) but also new services such as a Workspace Management service (for dynamic accounts), Data Replication Service, Grid Teleoperation Control Protocol service, and an expanded set of Monitoring and Discovery services. In terms of standards conformance, GT4 provides probably the most full-featured implementation of Web services security available anywhere; a full-featured GridFTP implementation; and support for the WS Resource Framework and WS-Notification specifications in C, Java, and Python containers.

Speakers

• GT4 Introduction (90 mins) -- Ian Foster & Lisa Childers
  • Overview (30 mins)
  • Implementation of Web Services Standards (15)
  • Performance (15)
  • Future directions (15)
  • Related Tools (15)
• Early Experiences with GT4 (90 mins) -- members of the Globus user community
  • GridCast, Terry Harmer, Queens University Belfast (15)
  • Ravi Subramanian, Intel (15)
  • Condor-G and GriPhyN, Jaime Frey, Wisconsin (15)
  • Ninf-G4: GridRPC system on GT4, Hidemoto Nakada, AIST (15)
  • Discussion (30)