Globus Toolkit

Announcing Release of GT 5.2.4

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:53:19 -0600

The GT development team is pleased to make a new stable release of the Globus Toolkit available for download.

This release is primarily to add beta support for "Sharing" for use with Globus Online

Download links:
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.2.4/

Quickstart and detailed installation instructions:
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.2/5.2.4/admin/

If you've already installed the 5.2 stable repository package, you can get the new packages via an apt or yum update without installing a new repo.

Highlights of this release include:

GridFTP

Add beta support for "Sharing" for use with Globus Online.
Added ability for clients to authenticate without delegating.
Added support for client to force using IPv6 via an environment variable
Improved reliability, logging, and fixed memory leaks

Native RPM / Debian Packages for the following systems:

CentOS 4, 5, 6;
Fedora 16, 17;
RHEL 5, 6;
Scientific Linux 5, 6;
Debian 6, 7 (testing);
Ubuntu 10.04, 11.10, 12.04, 12.10;

The toolkit is also tested on the following platforms: Solaris 11, MacOS 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

Announcing Release of GT 5.2.3

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:53:32 -0600

The GT development team is pleased to make a new stable release of the Globus Toolkit available for download.

Download links:
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.2.3/

Quickstart and Detailed installation instructions:
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.2/5.2.3/admin/

If you've already installed the 5.2 stable repository package, you can get the new packages via an apt or yum update without installing a new repo.

Highlights of this release include:

GridFTP
- Fixed logging bugs found during XSEDE validation testing
GRAM5
- Add support for LSF as a local resource manager.
- Fix some stability bugs with SEG.
MyProxy
- Updated to MyProxy v5.9.
GSI-Enabled OpenSSH
- Updated to gsissh v5.5.

This release adds support for Ubuntu 12.04LTS and 12.10

Also supported with native RPM or Debian Packages:

CentOS 4, 5, 6;
Fedora 16, 17;
RHEL 5, 6;
Scientific Linux 5, 6;
Debian 6, 7 (testing);
Ubuntu 10.04, 11.10, 12.04, 12.10;

The toolkit is also tested on the following platforms: Solaris 11, MacOS 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

IGE asks for your support

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:14:16 -0500

The Initiative for Globus in Europe, IGE (http://www.ige-project.eu/) is the central European meeting point for all Globus users, developers, and administrators in Europe. Over the last 1.5 years, we set up many Globus-related services, such as bringing Globus closer to you by making it a part of the EGI UMD, providing support for Globus, developing requested Globus adaptations (batch system adaptors, accounting, etc.), organizing Globus training sessions (next one is at GridKa) and conferences (next are the GlobusEUROPE in Prague on September 17th, and the EGCF meetings), providing easily installable binary Globus distributions, etc.

In order to assess how effective our work is, IGE collaborates with ERINA+. As part of this assessment, ERINA+ has devised a short questionnaire and IGE would like to ask all who work with Globus technologies in one way or another to fill in this questionnaire (please select "IGE" as the project) at:

http://users.erinaplus.eu/welcome.php

Please also pass on this news item to colleagues and friends who might otherwise not receive it. The deadline is by the end of August 2012, so prompt responses to the questionnaire are much appreciated.

And last but not least: please register for EGCF, the European Globus Community Forum. EGCF will maintain Globus-related software after the end of IGE, enable discussions and meetings, give you a premium account with IGE�s bug tracker, etc. Please register at:

http://www.egcf.eu/register

Registration integrates you into the European Globus community and unlocks many advantages for you! It is free of charge and has no obligations on your part.

Thank you very much,
Dr. Helmut Heller
Project Director, IGE

Announcing Release of GT 5.2.2

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:48:50 -0500

A new point release in the 5.2 series of the Globus Toolkit is now available: 5.2.2.

Highlights of this release include:

GridFTP

Added a new recommended "hybrid" server configuration option
- It's a split/single mode which only creates backend connections if client requests stripes
Fixed a security bug where GridFTP acts as wrong user when user doesn't exist
Improved memory management and process management
Improved reliability

GRAM5

Improved memory management and process management
Improved scalability and reliability

MyProxy

Updated to MyProxy version v5.8

GSI-Enabled OpenSSH

Updated to gsissh version v5.5

Repositories Supported:

CentOS 4,5,6
Fedora 15,16,17
RHEL 5,6
Scientific Linux 5,6
SLES 11
Debian 6,7
Ubuntu 10.04, 10,10, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04

Note: For those that have 5.2.0 or 5.2.1 installed from the globus repo, doing an update will install the new 5.2.2 packages.

Relevant 5.2.2 links:

Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.2/5.2.2/rn/
Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.2.2/
Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.2/5.2.2/
Support: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit#Mailing_Lists

We look forward to and encourage your feedback on GT 5.2. Thanks for your support of Globus software.

GlobusWORLD April 10-12 at Argonne National Laboratory

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:23:43 -0500

The 10th annual GlobusWORLD conference will be held April 10-12, 2012 at Argonne National Laboratory (near Chicago, IL). The leading event for Globus users worldwide, GlobusWORLD offers over two days of presentations, tutorials, and networking opportunities for users, developers and resource owners.

Agenda highlights:

Keynote address by XSEDE�s John Towns (PI and Project Director)
Keynote address by Blue Waters� Michelle Butler (NCSA Technical Program Manager)
Keynote address by Ian Foster, Globus Co-Founder

The 2012 theme is �Move. Store. Collaborate.� Presentations will focus on how Globus technologies help researchers move their data where they need it, store it for easy access, and collaborate with others via simplified sharing and management.

For more details, go to www.globusworld.org.

Announcing Release of GT 5.0.5

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:47:50 -0600

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new point release in the 5.0 series of the Globus Toolkit is now available - 5.0.5.

**Note** GT 5.0.5 will likely be the last release for the GT 5.0.x series. Soon we'll release GT 5.2.1, which will be a superset of the 5.0.5 source code. 5.2.x includes the convenience and simplicity of installing GT components using binary native packages. We are encouraging users to move to the GT 5.2.x series at their convenience. OSG has already moved to 5.2. Soon 5.2 will be available directly in Debian, EPEL, RHEL, Ubuntu, ... repos.

Highlights of this release include:

GridFTP

Added ability to restrict the directories/paths a server may access.
Added server support for setting file modification time.
Added ability (MLSC) to stream directory listings over the control channel.

GRAM5

Fixed bugs affecting stability found by OSG during high scalability testing.
Added "log facility" option to support GRAM logging to syslog.

MyProxy

Updated to MyProxy version v5.6.

GSI-Enabled OpenSSH

Updated to gsissh version 5.4.

Relevant 5.0.5 links:

Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.5/rn/
Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.0.5/
Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.5/
Support: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit#Mailing_Lists

Announcing Release of GT 5.2.0

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:37:13 -0600

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team, I am pleased to announce the production release of Globus Toolkit (GT) 5.2.

GT 5.2 is the culmination of more than a year of development effort to greatly enhance the ability to install, setup and update the GT client and service components. This has been achieved by providing binary native packages for the following platforms: Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Scientific Linux, and CentOS. We will maintain a Globus repository containing all packages. We have started the process to become package maintainers for various RPM and Debian repos and will be working to include the 5.2 Globus packages into these repos soon.

Many thanks to the IGE (Initiative for Globus in Europe) team for their collaboration and contributions on this native packaging effort. Also, I'd like to thank Joe Bester for his significant development contributions on this release.

By following the Quickstart guide, you can now easily install and setup a full GT environment in minutes.

GT 5.2.0 includes the latest versions of all components: GRAM, GridFTP, MyProxy and GSISSH. This latest version of GRAM includes a number of scalability and reliability improvements found from working with Open Science Grid (OSG) that are not in the 5.0 series. GridFTP added support for the DCSC command, which allows the client to specify credentials used to secure the data channel connection. Globus Online utilizes this command for seamless data movement across multiple security domains.

GT 5.2 is protocol and client API compatible with GT 5.0 (e.g. 5.2 clients will work with GT 5.0 services, and visa versa.)

Relevant 5.2 links:

- Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.2/5.2.0/rn/
- Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.2.0/
- Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.2/5.2.0/
- Support: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit#Mailing_Lists

We look forward to and encourage your feedback on GT 5.2. Thanks for your support of Globus software.

Announcing Release of Grid Development Tools (GDT) 2

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:45:27 -0500

The GDTE team, based at the University of Marburg, is pleased to announce the release of rid Development Tools for Eclipse 2 (GDTE2). The new version includes many improvements and bug fixes, as well as support for Unicore 6.x. Whats new in GDTE2?

Globus Toolkit 4.2 support (4.0 is still supported)
New plugin architecture (for easier support of new middlewares)
Many internal changes
Improved UI
p2 based update site (implicit dependency handling)
Nightly-build and beta update site

Headless versions for all platforms can be found on the GDT Web page.

The release can be easily installed using the Eclipse update/install mechanism (Update site: http://mage.uni-marburg.de/eclipse).

Installation instructions, tutorials and documentation can be found at: http://mage.uni-marburg.de/gdt and the Globus GDTE developer wiki.

If you have any questions or problems feel free to send a mail to one of our mailing lists: http://mage.uni-marburg.de/trac/gdt/wiki/MailingLists.

For those who are not familiar with GDTE, the Grid Development Tools for Eclipse (GDTE) feature is a bundle of Eclipse Plugins useful for Service and Application Development in the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment for the Globus Toolkit 4.0, 4.2 and UNICORE. Apart from using GDT in the Eclipse Workbench interactively, we support using Eclipse headless, i.e. running the GDT tools as commandline tools, offering the possibility to include them in automated build scripts or other IDEs.

The GDTE Developers.

Announcing Release of GT 5.0.4

Wed, 18 May 2011 13:49:22 -0500

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new point release in the 5.0 series of the Globus Toolkit is now available - 5.0.4.

Highlights of this release include:

GridFTP

Fixed GridFTP server bugs in striped or split configurations related to DCSC, setting driver stacks, and hanging backend processes.
Fixed globus-url-copy bugs related to sync operations.
Added globus-gridftp-server options -dc-default and -fs-default to make configurable the default xio driver stack for the network and filesystem. Previously, only the client was able to set this in a session. This makes it possible to always use drivers such as the rate limiting driver or the netlogger driver.

GRAM5

Added RSL attributes to make it easier to debug an individual gram job.
Added unique job manager log file names so that all log files for all users can be written to a central location instead of each user's home directory.

MyProxy

Updated to MyProxy version 5.4

GSI-Enabled OpenSSH

Updated to gsissh version 5.3

Relevant 5.0.4 links:

Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.4/rn/
Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.0.4/
Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.4/
Support: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit#Mailing_Lists

We look forward to and encourage your feedback on GT5. Thanks for your support of Globus software.

Viva Globus!

-Stu Martin

KNOWLEDGE GRID: A service-oriented data mining framework on Grids

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:06:25 -0500

The Grid Computing Lab of University of Calabria (Italy) in cooperation with ICAR-CNR developed a new version of the KNOWLEDGE GRID which allows for the distributed execution of data mining algorithms and KDD applications on Grids through the use of WSRF Web Services. In this new version is fully service-oriented and each data mining task or workflow is implemented as one or a set of services.

The KNOWLEDGE GRID is designed on top of computational Grid mechanisms provided by Grid environments such as Globus Toolkit and uses basic Grid services such as communication, authentication, information, and resource management to build more specific distributed data mining tools and services. The KNOWLEDGE GRID services are organized into two layers: Core K-Grid Layer , which is built on top of generic Grid services, and High-Level K-Grid Layer, which is implemented over the core layer.

The KNOWLEDGE GRID enables the collaboration of scientists that must mine data that are stored in different research centers as well as executive managers that must use a knowledge management system that operates on several data warehouses located in the different company establishments.

A visual software environment, named DIS3GNO, has been implemented to allow a user to:

compose a distributed data mining workflow;
execute the workflow onto the KNOWLEDGE GRID;
visualize the results of the data mining task.

DIS3GNO performs the mapping of user-defined workflows to the conceptual model and submits it to the KNOWLEDGE GRID services, managing the overall computation in a way that is transparent to the user.

The software prototype is available at the following URL: http://grid.deis.unical.it/kgrid/index.html

Globus selected as a Google Summer of Code 2011 mentoring organization

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:54:25 -0500

For the fourth year in a row, The Globus Alliance has been selected as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization (http://code.google.com/soc/)

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google works with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than 3,000 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its seventh year.

If you are a student and would be interested in participating in GSoC with Globus as your mentoring organization, please take a look at our GSoC Ideas page:

http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011_Ideas

The list spans a variety of Globus projects, including Globus Online. Most of our proposed summer projects require knowing C, Java, or Python, and some of them may require being familiar with Globus technologies and distributed systems

However, this is not a closed list so, if you have an idea for a cool project that uses or extends Globus technologies, please take a look at our list of Globus GSoC mentors and contact the one which most closely matches your interests.

Student proposals must be submitted by April 8th through the GSoC web application:

http://www.google-melange.com/

If you have any questions about our participation in GSoC, please contact please contact Borja Sotomayor (our GSoC Organization Administrator).

Announcing Release of GT 5.0.3

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:38:59 -0600

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new point release in the 5.0 series of the Globus Toolkit is now available - 5.0.3.

Highlights of this release include:

GridFTP
- Added new command: Data Channel Security Context (DCSC)
  - Useful for 3rd party transfers between GridFTP servers that use different CA certificates
- Added gridftp server chrooting
  - Allows admin to limit the directories a gridftp server can access
- Added command strings for '-disable-command-list' option for gridftp server configuration
- Added Progress markers for stream mode
GRAM5
- Fixed a variety of bugs: PBS and Condor specific, improved reliability, improved usability
- Fixed bugs preventing build on Solaris
MyProxy
- Updated to MyProxy version v5.3
GSI-Enabled OpenSSH
- Updated to gsissh version 5.2

Relevant 5.0.3 links:

Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/rn/
Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.0.3/
Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/
Support: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit#Mailing_Lists

We look forward to and encourage your feedback on GT5. Thanks for your support of Globus software.

Viva Globus!

-Stu Martin

GlobusWORLD 2011: Call for Participation

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 12:02:07 -0600

GlobusWORLD 2011
April 11-13, 2011
Argonne, Illinois USA

GlobusWORLD 2011 will be held April 11-13, at Argonne (near Chicago, IL). Co-located with the Cloud Computing and its Applications 2011 Conference (CCA-11), GlobusWORLD comprises two and a half days of presentations, tutorials, and networking opportunities related to the Globus software ecosystem. Building on the success of last year's event and the launch of Globus Online at SC10 in New Orleans last November, GlobusWORLD 2011 will feature new user success stories, expanded software-as-a-service capabilities in Globus Online, updates on Globus Toolkit development, and sneak peeks into planned features.

The GlobusWORLD 2011 program offers keynote talks by Globus leaders and presentations of innovative Globus-based infrastructure and applications by users and community leaders. A day of tutorials after the conference provides participants an opportunity for hands-on interaction with current Globus technologies and in-depth discussions of selected topics.

There are multiple opportunities for participation and we are currently soliciting proposals for presentations and posters (see http://globusworld.org/files/2011/02/GW2011_CFP.pdf). Submissions should be centered on Globus applications and development of related technologies, with emphasis on unique capabilities and value delivered to researchers and other end users. In addition to this call for participation, we will host a number of engaging events where participants may compete for prizes and recognition - stay tuned!

Announcing DemoGrid!

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 11:43:39 -0600

I am happy to announce the first release of Globus DemoGrid, a tool that will build an instructional grid environment that you can then deploy, using virtual machines, on a cloud (such as Amazon EC2) or on your own physical resources.

http://www.globus.org/demogrid/

The main goal of DemoGrid is to provide users with easy access to an environment where they can "tinker" with various Grid tools, without having to install these tools themselves or needing an account on an existing grid. Once a DemoGrid environment is deployed, it provides a fully configured (albeit simplified) grid comprising multiple "organizations", each with common Grid services, such as GridFTP, GRAM, etc. User accounts are pre-created that allow you to immediately run jobs, move data, etc.

Using Amazon EC2 makes DemoGrid particularly easy to use, and mostly involves writing a simple configuration file and running two commands. You can get an idea of what this process looks like on our EC2 quickstart:

http://confluence.globus.org/display/DEMOGRID/DemoGrid+EC2+quickstart

DemoGrid is still in its early stages of development, and we will be adding more features and supporting more Grid tools in the coming year. We welcome feedback from users, Grid administrators, and educators on what you would like to see included in DemoGrid.

Cheers!
--
Borja Sotomayor
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~borja/

Globus Online Launches at SC10

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:31:01 -0600

Globus Online is Live! The cloud-hosted, secure file transfer service, is now available for general use. Globus Online enables researchers and other end users to move and synchronize files reliably between multiple locations without configuring servers or installing complex software. Multiple events planned at the upcoming Sc10 conference in New Orleans that will showcase Globus Online's simplicity and ease-of-use. Details are available here.

Save the Date: GlobusWORLD 2011

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:33:18 -0500

GlobusWORLD 2011 will be held February 1-4 at Argonne (near Chicago, Illinois, USA). Building on the user momentum generated by this year's conference, GlobusWORLD 2011 will feature new user success stories as well as updates on Globus development. The Globus team will showcase innovative software-as-a-service capabilities that are the foundation for the next wave of distributed collaborative computation -- and our traditionally oversubscribed tutorial day will feature additional topics to better address the needs of both end-users and developers.

Conference themes include:

Globus User Experiences - Innovative applications of Globus technology
Globus Community Updates - Progress enabled by Globus in various research communities
Globus Software-as-a-Service - The "no-IT" approach to distributed collaborative computing

We were thrilled by the level of engagement at this year's conference and we encourage you to attend what promises to be an even more informative event and a great opportunity to network with your peers.

See www.globusworld.org/about for more information.

Announcing Nimbus 2.5 final release

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:02:50 -0500

We are happy to announce the Nimbus 2.5 release!

This release introduces two major new features.The first one is the Cumulus storage
cloud implementation that has been integrated with the Workspace Service but can
also be used standalone. Cumulus is compatible with the Amazon Web Services S3
REST API and has a pluggable backend that allows it to support multiple storage
systems used by the scientific community. It also includes support for quota management.
Cumulus replaces the current GridFTP-based upload and download of VM images.
The second new feature is the Zero -> Cloud installation process, which significantly
simplifies Nimbus installation and also includes user management tools.

In addition, this release also contains new scheduling and network configuration options,
new propagation methods, new workspace pilot options, as well as multiple smaller
features and bugfixes -- too many to cover them all in an announcement! The full list is
available in the changelog at:

http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.5/changelog.html#2.5

The community testing and feedback has been an invaluable help. This has been
the most active and productive release cycle that Nimbus has seen and resulted in
a product that all of us can be proud of. We would like to thank all who volunteered
their effort to help with testing and submitted patches to this release. In particular, we'd
like to thank Patrick Armstrong, Colin Leavett-Brown, Paul Marshall, Paulo Motta,
Pierre Riteau, Marien Ritzenthaler, and Matt Vliet.

The Nimbus 2.5 release is available for download at:

http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

Documentation is available at:

http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.5/

The Nimbus Team

Announcing RC2 of Nimbus 2.5 release

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:56:46 -0500

We are happy to announce RC2 of Nimbus 2.5 release!

This release "rounds out" the new features introduced in RC1, addresses usability concerns, improves and adds documentation, and provides several new developer features. In addition, the release also of course provides bug fixes relative to RC1.

The full changelog information is available at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.5/changelog.html

Nimbus 2.5 RC2 is available for download at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

The community testing and feedback has been an invaluable help, this has been the most active and productive release candidate cycle that Nimbus has seen and we think it will show in the final release. We would like to thank all who volunteered their effort to help with testing and submitted patches to this release. Specifically, we would like to acknowledge the help of Pierre Riteau, Patrick Armstrong, Paul Marshall, Paulo Motta, Marien Ritzenthaler, Colin Leavett-Brown, and Matt Vliet.

The Nimbus Team

Kate Keahey
Mathematics and CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Announcing release of GT 5.0.2

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:36:18 -0500

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new point release in the 5.0 series of the Globus Toolkit is now available - 5.0.2.

Highlights of this release include:

GridFTP
- Synchronization (globus-url-copy -sync) feature that transfers files only if they do not exist at the destination or differ from the source
- An offline mode for the server
GRAM5
- Improvements have been made to address all the known blocker issues for production deployment on TeraGrid and OSG
MyProxy
- Updated to MyProxy v5.2

Relevant 5.0.2 links:

Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.2/rn/
Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.0.2/
Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.2/
Support: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit#Mailing_Lists

We look forward to and encourage your feedback on GT5. Thanks for your support of Globus software.

Viva Globus!

-Stu Martin

Announcing Nimbus 2.4 final release

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:32:52 -0500

The major new feature of this release is a new installer which makes the installation process significantly easier and faster, eliminates the need for a separate Globus container installation, and sets up an embedded certificate authority. Another significant contribution is a refinements to the Nimbus cloud monitoring service including a new feature that aggregates monitoring information from various Nimbus clouds. In addition, the release contains numerous feature enhancements and bug fixes, the full changelog is available at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/current/changelog.html#2.4

The Nimbus 2.4 release is available for download at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

Documentation is available at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.4/

Many thanks to folks who contributed their time, comments, and patches during the release candidate process! We would like to particularly acknowledge Patrick Armstrong, Ian Gable, Paulo Ricardo Motta Gomes, Colin Leavett-Brown, Mike Lowe, Paul
Marshall, Pierre Riteau, and Mauricio Tsugawa.

Kate Keahey
Mathematics and CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Google Summer of Code 2010 accepted students announced

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:19:45 -0500

The list of student proposals accepted for participation in Google Summer of Code^TM were announced today. The Globus Alliance is participating as a mentoring organization for the third year in a row and has received funding from Google for twelve students. This year, we received nearly a hundred project proposals and, given the high quality of many of them, narrowing down the selection to just twelve was no easy task. Congratulations to our selected students for proposing such outstanding summer projects!

Monitoring Service
by David Abdurachmanov
Mentored by Steve Graham.

XIO Reliable Multicast
by Bjorn Andersson
Mentored by Mattias Lidman.

Annotation Generation and Analysis Supporting Services-Oriented Scientific Workflow Discovery and Composition
by Michael Benson
Mentored by Jia Zhang.

Making the Swift Parallel Scripting System Easy to Install, Evaluate and Learn on Readily Available Computing Resources
by David Kelly
Mentored by Mike Wilde.

Visualizing and summarising high volume, wide-area data movement with statistical methods and association rules
by Sami Kiviharju
Mentored by Lisa Childers.

Profiling the new GridFTP server
by Huong Luu
Mentored by Raj Kettimuthu.

Unix Domain Sockets for XIO as transport driver
by Vivek Malik
Mentored by Joe Bester.

A RESTful service for orchestration of third party transfers and credential delegation using OAuth
by Nandana Mihindukulasooriya
Mentored by Tom Howe.

Condor-enabled VMs on Nimbus
by Paulo Ricardo Motta Gomes
Mentored by Tim Freeman.

Storage system support for Swift
by Thiago Silva
Mentored by Mike Wilde.

Nimbus and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Integration
by Matthew Vliet
Mentored by Ian Gable.

A 'GoogleMap' for scientific services and workflows
by Yuxin Wan
Mentored by Wei Tan.

We are proud to announce the release of GT 5.0.1!

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:38:44 -0500

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new point release in the 5.0 series of the Globus Toolkit is now available - 5.0.1.

Highlights of this release include:

GridFTP

New globus-url-sync command for syncing individual files or directories
New server option to control the default permissions of created files
New server option to time out on slow or hanging filesystems
New server logging level to include transfer statistics

GRAM5

Improved reliability with Condor-G clients
Fixed a number of bugs and memory leaks

MyProxy

Updated to MyProxy v5.1

GSI-OpenSSH

Updated to GSI-OpenSSH v5.2

GSI

Added OpenSSL 1.0.0 Support

Relevant 5.0.1 links:

Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.1/rn/
Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.0.1/
Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.1/
Support: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit#Mailing_Lists

We look forward to and encourage your feedback on GT5. Thanks for your support of Globus software.

Viva Globus!

-Stu Martin

New installation options for GT5

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:09:11 -0500

Thanks to Mattias Ellert at Uppsala Universitet, a Windows installer for GT 5.0 is now available, and includes most standard Globus components like GSI and GridFTP. This installer is the latest addition to the native packages for Fedora, RHEL, Debian and Ubuntu already maintained at Uppsala, and brings the number of platforms supported by the Globus Toolkit to thirteen. Additional details and downloads are available at: http://www.grid.tsl.uu.se/repos/.

We appreciate the efforts of Mattias Ellert and all the other members of the Globus community who continue to make significant contributions, such as this one, to the development of the Globus Toolkit. Information about other third party releases may be found in a new section of the GT Downloads page at http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/#thirdparty.

Globus selected as a Google Summer of Code 2010 mentoring organization

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:45:50 -0500

For the third year in a row, the Globus Alliance has been selected as a Google Summer of Code^TM mentoring organization. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google works with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than 3,000 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its sixth year.

If you are a student and would be interested in participating in GSoC with Globus as your mentoring organization, please take a look at our GSoC Ideas page. This page lists projects that Globus has proposed for GSoC, but it is not a closed list. If you have an idea for a cool project that uses or extends Globus technologies, please take a look at our list of Globus GSoC mentors and contact the one who most closely matches your interests. Take into account that student proposals must be submitted by April 9th through the GSoC web application.

If you have any questions about our participation in GSoC, please contact Borja Sotomayor (our GSoC Organization Administrator).

GlobusWORLD 2010: March 2-4 at Argonne - register now!

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:27:11 -0600

Registration and Preliminary Program are now available for GlobusWORLD 2010 which will be held March 2-4 at Argonne (near Chicago Illinois, USA). This year's GlobusWORLD conference will focus on Globus success stories, including discussions with Globus users about their experiences, technical presentations, and tutorials on using new (and old) Globus software.

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
In addition to the traditional State of the Union by Ian Foster (Argonne and UChicago) and Grill the Globus Gurus (Open discussion with Globus leaders), other selected sessions and speakers include:

Globus Community Updates
- Condor: Miron Livny, Univesity of Wisconsin-Madison
- caBIG: Ravi Madduri, Argonne and Stephen Langella, Scott Oster, and Shannon Hastings, OSU
- RENCI: John McGee, RENCI
Globus Components and User Experiences
- GridFTP: Raj Kettimuthu, Argonne and Brian Tieman, Advanced Photon Source
- GRAM5: Stuart Martin, Argonne and Open Science Grid - Igor Sfiligoi, FNAL
Globus Futures
- Globus.org: Steve Tuecke, Argonne
- Crux: Ravi Madduri, Argonne
- Cloud Computing: Kate Keahey, Argonne (tentative)

REGISTRATION
Registration is now available at www.globusworld.org. The low registration fee of $150 includes access to all program sessions, tutorials, meals, and social functions. Due to Argonne security restrictions, attendees are encouraged to register as early as possible to ensure admittance to the site.

MORE INFORMATION
The Globus community is comprised of individuals representing many organizations and projects, and we are excited about engaging all constituents in re-invigorating the Globus effort. We are enthusiastic about increasing the value that Globus can deliver to the many, multi-institutional scientific and biomedical communities whose need for robust Grid computing middleware continues to grow unabated.

See www.globusworld.org for details.

We are proud to announce the release of GT 5.0.0!

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:07:58 -0600

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new stable release of the Globus Toolkit is now available.

Most components of GT5 are incremental updates (numerous bug fixes and new features) over their GT4 counter-parts (e.g. GridFTP, RLS, MyProxy, GSI-OpenSSH). Some components of GT4 are not included in GT5 (e.g. GT4 Java Core, WS-GRAM4, RFT), to be replaced by new software under development (e.g. Crux, Globus.org Service). And GRAM has been vastly improved by returning to the pre-ws GRAM2 code base and making substantial backward-compatible improvements. Details about each component are available in the release notes.

GT4.x releases will continue to be maintained and supported at least through the end of 2010. New users should immediately adopt 5.0.0. Existing users are encouraged to begin evaluating and migrating to GT5. Please contact us if you have questions or problems along the way.

We look forward to and encourage your feedback on GT5.

Relevant 5.0.0 links:

Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.0/rn/
Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.0.0/
Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.0/
Support: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit#Mailing_Lists
Background: http://lists.globus.org/pipermail/announce/2009-March/000054.html and http://lists.globus.org/pipermail/gt-user/2009-October/008578.html.

Thanks for your support of Globus software.

Viva Globus!

-Stu Martin

CoG JGlobus 1.8.0 released

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:54:59 -0600

We are happy to announce CoG JGlobus 1.8.0. For details, please take a look at http://dev.globus.org/wiki/CoG_jglobus and the release page at http://dev.globus.org/wiki/CoG_JGlobus_1.8.0.

As always, changes are documented in CHANGES.TXT, http://tinyurl.com/y9xv3ga, and bug fixes include the following:

normalizing email address in DNs for signing policy
full certificate verification in org.globus.gsi.GlobusCredential.verify():
http://bugzilla.globus.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6870
GridFTP remote hang detection:
https://bugzilla.mcs.anl.gov/globus/show_bug.cgi?id=6883
configurable refresh interval for CRL loading:
https://bugzilla.mcs.anl.gov/globus/show_bug.cgi?id=6891

Thanks to all those who contributed features and fixes, and for the support of CoG JGlobus.

The CoG JGlobus Project Committers

Google Summer of Code projects developed by Globus students featured on Google Open Source blog

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:47:37 -0600

The Globus Alliance participated in this year's Google Summer of Code, a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects, and received funding for ten students. The interesting work done by our Google Summer of Code students is featured in this post on the Google Open Source Blog:

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/12/rocking-grid-globus-alliances-second.html

Important information on Globus events and plans

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:52:49 -0500

Dear Colleagues:

Earlier this year we requested input to help us shape our plans for Globus' future. (http://www.mail-archive.com/gt-user@lists.globus.org/msg00927.html). Since then we have been listening, discussing, exploring alternatives, and finally making decisions about our future efforts in Globus. This email is a long-overdue follow-up to that previous note, summarizing our plans.

Note that this mail describes plans only for those portions of Globus led primarily by U Chicago, Argonne, and USC/ISI. The Globus community is larger than just these institutions, with substantial contributions from many individuals and organizations based on many distinct project and funding priorities. Our plans highlighted here includes much input from these contributors, but do not speak for those individuals and organizations.

A) EVENTS

We are planning several events in the coming months where Globus' future (and present) can be further explained, discussed, and refined, including:

* SC'09 (http://sc09.supercomputing.org/), November 15-20, Portland, Oregon, USA: Please come visit us at the Argonne National Laboratory booth.

* Viva Globus, December 16 at Argonne (near Chicago, Illinois, USA): It has been a while since our last "Viva Globus" contributors meeting. We will revive this meeting series on December 16. More information will be forthcoming soon. This meeting is intended for substantial contributors to the Globus software, as an opportunity to update each other on our respective activities, discuss future plans and collaborations, and make decisions regarding community governance and processes. Of particular focus at this next Viva Globus will be discussions and decisions regarding the future of the Globus Alliance governance.

* GlobusWorld, March 2-4 at Argonne (near Chicago Illinois, USA): This latest installment of the GlobusWorld user conference series will be focused on users of the Globus software, including talks and tutorials on using new (and old) Globus software, and presentations and discussions by Globus users on their experiences. More information about this conference will become available starting at SC'09.

B) DECISIONS

The following points summarize the decisions that we have made over the past 6 months during the re-evaluation process:

1. Of paramount importance is improving the quality of the Globus software and the service we provide to Globus users. We will continue to maintain and support the existing Globus Toolkit version 4.x (GT4) software as long as demand exists and funding allows, minimally through the end of the CDIGS project in December 2010. And in all changes and enhancements we are making to Globus going forward, we are placing a strong emphasis on issues related to helping our community migrate forward.

2. We have made some long-overdue, difficult decisions about some of the more problematic portions of Globus, including:

2.a. There have been long struggles and confusion over the GRAM2 vs. GRAM4 components. We have resolved these problems by re-investing in, fixing, and enhancing GRAM2. This new version, called GRAM5, is fully backward compatible with GRAM2 (with two minor exceptions*), but solves its scalability issues and adds numerous frequently requested features. It is currently in alpha testing by several major users, who are using it with existing GT4 Java jGlobus/COG clients, C clients, and Condor-G. It will be released soon as part of GT5. We will continue to support GRAM4 at least through December 2010 (perhaps longer, depending upon demand and funding), but have begun to assist GRAM4 users in migrating to GRAM5. If you are an existing GRAM4 user and would like to discuss migration issues to GRAM5, please contact us. For a more complete description of the GRAM5 alpha release, see http://dev.globus.org/wiki/GRAM/GRAM5. We welcome additional testing and bug reports on this GRAM5 alpha release.

(*The two exceptions to GRAM5's backward compatibility with GRAM2 are: (i) no support for MPICH-G/MPIG job rendezvous; and (ii) GRAM5 stages out stdout/err at the end of the job rather than streaming them out while the job runs.)

2.b. The Reliable File Transfer (RFT) service has been of considerable interest to many Globus users, but in practice has suffered from difficulties in both use and operation. We have decided to replace the RFT functionality with a new Globus.org service, described below.

2.c. GT4 Java Core is based heavily on obsolete technology (Apache Axis 1.x) and standards (WSRF), yet nonetheless continues to provide tremendous value-add to Web Services-based Grid builders, particularly in the area of security and stateful resource management. With the urging of, and in partnership with, some of our large Java Core users such as the caGrid team at Ohio State University, we have begun the Globus Crux effort to update our Java Web Services stack to newer technologies (e.g., Apache CXF), while preserving and enhancing our core value-add security capabilities as a plug-in to CXF and allowing for WSRF protocol compatibility. We expect to release an alpha version of Crux by the end of 2009. See http://confluence.globus.org/display/whi/Crux+for+GT+Developers for details.

2.d. While MDS is applicable to a broad range of monitoring and discovery tasks, in practice its predominant use has been to build service registries/catalogs for TeraGrid, caBIG, and BIRN, with limited adoption for systems monitoring in a few other communities. Since MDS4 is intimately intertwined with GT4 Java Core, it would require a substantial reimplementation effort to update it to Crux. Meanwhile, the state of monitoring tools has evolved considerably since MDS4 was first conceived, with the widespread adoption of highly capable, open source monitoring tools such as Nagios. Therefore we have begun work on a more focused effort to design and implement next generation service registry capabilities using Crux, which we are calling our Integrated Information Services (IIS) effort. This IIS effort is still in the requirements gathering phase, with no releases planned until sometime in 2010. We recommend that monitoring needs be met using other tools such as Nagios.

3. Development continues unabated for the other components of the Globus Toolkit (e.g., GridFTP, RLS, Myproxy, GSI-OpenSSH, etc) and the many other active dev.globus components (http://dev.globus.org).

4. We plan to release Globus Toolkit version 5 (GT5) in late 2009, as recently announced (http://www.mail-archive.com/gt-user@lists.globus.org/msg01311.html). Like previous versions of GT, this version will continue to offer a collection of tools that Grid builders can use to create a wide variety of Grid solutions for specific communities. GT5 will include GridFTP, GRAM5, RSL, Myproxy, GSI-OpenSSH, and the relevant underlying C libraries such as GSSAPI, XIO, C Core, etc. Note that GT5 will not include Java Core. Instead, we will continue to support GT4 Java Core, and will work with our users to migrate GT4 Java Core services to Crux when it becomes available.

5. Globus Toolkit version 5.2, targeted for Q1 2010, will focus on repackaging the GT5 components into independent component releases that leverage OS-native packaging approaches (e.g., RPM), with assistance from other groups (e.g., KnowARC) who have already blazed this trail. Subsequent GT releases in the remainder of 2010 will focus primarily on usability and reliability, along with features required by Globus.org. The repackaging effort will not impact backward compatibility with GT 5.0. We expect GT 5.2 clients and services to be fully compatible with GT 5.0.

C) THE GLOBUS.ORG ONLINE SERVICE

We are creating a new Globus.org online, hosted service (i.e., Software-as-a-Service), to provide higher-level, end-to-end Grid capabilities, targeted to end users, as well as Grid builders looking for more complete solutions to build upon. Initial functionality of Globus.org will focus on replacing and enhancing the RFT functionality of reliable, high-performance, fire-and-forget data transfer, but over time will grow to include more “collective layer” functionality (as described in the “Anatomy of the Grid” paper 1]). We plan to debut and demonstrate Globus.org at SC'09 next month. We will begin operating a beta version of this service in November 2009 to a limited set of initial users, with a substantial ramp-up starting in early 2010.

During the remaining 14 months of the CDIGS project, we intend to focus more resources toward Grid data management problems. We have seen tremendous growth in GridFTP usage over the past 2 years. Through a combination of usability and packaging improvements to GridFTP, along with the introduction of end-to-end Grid data management capabilities in Globus.org, we intend to substantially increase the value and resulting usage of the Globus data management software.

D) NEW LEADERSHIP

We are pleased to welcome returning and new leadership to our Globus team. Steve Tuecke, who was the Globus lead architect for its first 10 years before leaving five years ago to start a company, returned to the University of Chicago in January 2009, and has resumed both technical and project leadership for our Globus activities. Additionally, the University of Chicago recruited Paul Dave’ to a new Director of User Services position in August 2009, with a mandate of dramatically improving the quality and methods by which we provide services to Globus users, including support, consulting and operations. We have also re-organized our software development team and processes, with the introduction of widely adopted Agile Scrum development practices.

We are excited about this re-invogoration of the Globus software and community, and the increasing value the Globus community can bring to the many multi-institutional scientific and biomedical communities whose need for robust Grid computing middleware continues to grow unabated.

Viva Globus!

The Globus Team

[1] “The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations,” Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, Steven Tuecke. International Journal of Supercomputer Applications, 15(3), 2001.

CoG JGlobus 1.7.0 Release

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:27:51 -0500

We are happy to announce CoG JGlobus 1.7.0. This release includes bug fixes, contribution for improvement of delegation with GSI SSL and some feature additions to the MyProxy Client. For details, please take a look at http://dev.globus.org/wiki/CoG_jglobus and release page at http://dev.globus.org/wiki/CoG_JGlobus_1.7.0

As always, changes are documented in CHANGES.TXT, http://tinyurl.com/n65jhb and bug fixes include:

Change MyProxy key length from 512 to 1024
Support trust root provisioning in myproxy jglobus client
org.globus.util.ConfigUtil.java doesn't recognize FreeBSD
grid-proxy-init -valid differs between COG and GT
Allow no authorization with delegation as a configurable option
support fail-over to a list of myproxy-server hosts
Streamline version number updates
jglobus signing_policy checking should be case insensitive
Bootstrap of trust fails with 1.7 RC3

Thanks to all those who contributed features and fixes, and for the support of CoG JGlobus.

The CoG JGlobus Project Committers

Spider, the world's biggest Lustre file system at ORNL's LCF is accessible via GridFTP

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:24:25 -0500

Ultimately, it will connect to all of ORNL's existing and future supercomputing platforms as well as off-site platforms across the country via GridFTP (a protocol that transports large data files), making data files accessible from any site in the system.

To learn more, read the article here:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Spider-Up-and-Spinning-Connections-to-All-Computing-Platforms-at-ORNL-50398972.html

KnowARC Project Brings Grids to Debian

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:02:04 -0500

The KnowARC project brings Globus packages to Debian Linux, paving the way for many Grid projects to be included in the popular distribution. Read the article here:

http://www.hpcwire.com/topic/middleware/KnowARC-Project-Brings-Grids-to-Debian-50368972.html

Nimbus in the news

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:27:46 -0500

"The open-source Nimbus software lets scientists and businesses summon supercomputers on demand and on the cheap. And the collective experience of years in the high-performance computing field feeds back into the development of next-generation systems that will dwarf today's supercomputers in speed and efficiency."

For more, see Supercomputing from clusters to clouds

Google Summer of Code 2009 accepted students announced

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:51:22 -0500

The list of student proposals accepted for participation in Google Summer of Code^TM were announced today. Google Summer of Code is a program that offers students a $4,500 stipend to write code for various open source projects over a three month period. The Globus Alliance is participating as a mentoring organization for the second year in a row and will receive funding for eleven students. This year, the Globus Alliance received many excellent proposals, and choosing the top eleven was challenging. Congratulations to our selected students for proposing such top-notch summer projects!

Multiple Cluster support for Nimbus
by Adam Bishop
Mentored by Ian Gable.

Distribution of computing jobs among different clouds (Nimbus, AWS)
by Jan-Philip Gehrcke
Mentored by Kate Keahey.

Performance characterization of GridFTP on 10+ Gigabit networks using hosts with 10 Gigabit network interface cards
by Jamie Hegarty
Mentored by Raj Kettimuthu.

Develop a new 'sync' feature for the GridFTP client, globus-url-copy.
by Shruti Jain
Mentored by Mike Link.

Globus XIO Checksum Driver
by Mattias Lidman
Mentored by Joe Bester.

A Taverna plug-in for constructing CQL queries to caGrid cancer research data services
by Monika Machunik
Mentored by Wei Tan.

GridWay + GoogleMaps web interface
by Carlos Martin
Mentored by Alejandro Lorca.

Scheduling Algorithms for Swift
by Jonathan Roelofs
Mentored by Ben Clifford.

Develop a GUI for GridWay
by Srini Vasan
Mentored by Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti.

AJAX web interface for Globus Toolkit services
by Fugang Wang
Mentored by Tom Howe.

PSK Globus XIO driver
by Melissa Weaver
Mentored by John Bresnahan.

Release of caGrid version 1.3

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:54:48 -0500

On behalf of the entire caGrid team, I am pleased to announce the release of caGrid version 1.3. All release artifacts can be accessed at https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/workspaces/Architecture/caGrid

Some key enhancements for the release include:

Continuous Integration: caGrid 1.3 enhances support for the latest releases (version 4.1.1) of the caCORE Software Development Kit (SDK) and Common Security Module (CSM). caGrid and the caCORE SDK now share a common code base for CQL. In addition, caGrid 1.3 supports the most recent web services containers in the NCI CBIIT Technology Stack (Tomcat 5.5.27 and JBoss 4.0.5).
Data Services: Significant enhancements to the Federated Query Processor (FQP), allowing a single, semantic query to execute across multiple caGrid services and return a single result set. FQP now supports WS-Notification, querying secure grid services via the caGrid Credential Delegation Service (CDS), configurable query execution parameters to allow only partial results to be returned, and out-of-band results using the caGrid Transfer Service and WS-Enumeration.
Introduce Toolkit: The Introduce Toolkit has a number of security-related enhancements, adding fine-grain control over authorization using CSM and Grid Grouper. Introduce also includes service updaters, allowing service developers to easily update-to and leverage caGrid 1.3.
Metadata Services: The Mobius Global Model Exchange (GME) has been entirely rewritten for caGrid 1.3 to support the Semantic requirements of caBIG software developers. The caGrid-developed caDSR grid service, based on the caCORE 3.1 API, has been deprecated, It has been replaced by the caDSR 4.0 data service (maintained by the caDSR team), and a new caGrid Metadata Model Service (MMS), whose purpose is creation and semantic annotation of caGrid metadata models using caDSR-derived data.
Security: Enhancements to the GAARDS infrastructure include support for multiple authentication profiles, including one-time passwords. Trusted Identity Providers can now be discovered programmatically, allowing full realization of federated authentication use cases. Auditing support has also been added to Dorian, giving systems administrators the degree of control they have requested.
Taverna Workflow: Orchestration of caGrid services is supported in this release though joint development with the Taverna project. The caGrid plug-in for the Taverna 2.0 workbench allows development of workflows using their rich user interface.

Feel free to contact me or Larry Brem if you have questions or suggestions.

Nimbus helps scientists run high energy physics experiments

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:40:13 -0500

A novel system is enabling high energy physicists at CERN in Switzerland, to make production runs that integrate their existing pool of distributed computers with dynamic resources in "science clouds." The work was presented at the 17th annual conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, held in Prague, Czech Republic, March 21-27.

The integration was achieved by leveraging two mechanisms: the Nimbus Context Broker, developed by computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, and a portable software environment developed at CERN.

Scientists working on A Large Ion Collider Experiment, also known as the ALICE collaboration, are conducting heavy ion simulations at CERN. They have been developing and debugging compute jobs on a collection of internationally distributed resources, managed by a scheduler called AliEn.

Since researchers can always use additional resources, the question arose, How can one integrate a cloud's dynamically provisioned resources into an existing infrastructure such as the ALICE pool of computers, and still ensure that the various AliEn services have the same deployment-specific information? Artem Harutyunyan, sponsored by the Google Summer of Code to work on the Nimbus project, made this question the focus of his investigation. The first challenge was to develop a virtual machine that would support ALICE production computations.

"Fortunately, the CernVM project had developed a way to provide virtual machines that can be used as a base supporting the production environment for all four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - including ALICE," said Harutyunyan, a graduate student at State Engineering University of Armenia and member of Yerevan Physics Institute ALICE group. "Otherwise, developing an environment for production physics runs would be a complex and demanding task."

The CernVM technology was originally started with the intent of supplying portable development environments that scientists could run on their laptops and desktops. A variety of virtual image formats are now supported, including the Xen images used by the Amazon EC2 as well as Science Clouds. The challenge for Harutyunyan was to find a way to deploy these images so that they would dynamically and securely register with the AliEn scheduler and thus join the ALICE resource pool.

Here the Nimbus Context Broker came into play. The broker allows a user to securely provide context-specific information to a virtual machine deployed on remote resources. It places minimal compatibility requirements on the cloud provider and can orchestrate information exchange across many providers.

"Commercial cloud providers such as EC2 allow users to deploy groups of unconnected virtual machines, whereas scientists typically need a ready-to-use cluster whose nodes share a common configuration and security context. The Nimbus Context Broker bridges that gap," said Kate Keahey, a computer scientist at Argonne and head of the Nimbus project.

Integration of the Nimbus Context Broker with the CernVM technology has proved a success. The new system dynamically deploys a virtual machine on the Nimbus cloud at the University of Chicago, which then joins the ALICE computer pool so that jobs can be scheduled on it. Moreover, with the addition of a queue sensor that deploys and terminates virtual machines based on demand, the researchers can experiment with ways to balance the cost of the additional resources against the need for them as evidenced by jobs in a queue.

According to Keahey, one of the most exciting achievements of the project was the fact that the work was accomplished by integrating cloud computing into the existing mechanisms. "We didn't need to change the users' perception of the system," Keahey said.

###

For more information on the CERNVM, please visit: http://cernvm.cern.ch

For more information on the Nimbus, please visit: http://workspace.globus.org

The U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Contact: Eleanor Taylor
etaylor@anl.gov
630-252-5510
DOE/Argonne National Laboratory

Globus selected as a Google Summer of Code 2009 mentoring organization

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:30:20 -0500

The Globus Alliance has been selected as a Google Summer of Code^TM 2009 mentoring organization. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google works with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together nearly 2,500 students with over 180 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fifth year.

If you have any questions about our participation in GSoC, please contact the Globus GSoC administrators.

International Summer School on Grid Computing 2009, Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:05:55 -0600

The School will provide an in-depth introduction to Grid technologies that underpin e-Infrastructure and Cyberinfrastructure. It will present a conceptual framework to enhance each student's ability to work in this rapidly advancing field. Reports from world leaders in deploying and exploiting Grids will complement lectures from research leaders shaping future e-Infrastructure. Hands-on laboratory exercises will give participants experience with widely used Grid middleware.

For more information, go to www.issgc.org.

MyProxy passes independent vulnerability assessment

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:46:33 -0600

Some great news about MyProxy:

With more than 200 deployments worldwide, NCSA's MyProxy is a core security service in many of today's grid computing infrastructures, including TeraGrid, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, Earth System Grid, Fusion Grid, and LHC Computing Grid. Today, all of those communities can sleep easier knowing that MyProxy has undergone an independent security evaluation that found no major vulnerabilities.

To read the whole article, go to: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/News/09/0223MyProxypasses.html

GridFTP GUI now available for versions of GT 4.0+

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:26:43 -0600

The GridFTP team is happy to announce a GridFTP GUI now available for versions 4.0, 4.2, and above. For more information and a Flash demo, please see:

http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/latest-stable/data/gridftp/user/#id2547848

Looking back on the development of the LHC grid [iSGTW 1/14/2009]

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:47:21 -0600

Transcript of Les Robertson's speech about how grid computing enabled the LHC.

"Consequently, we decided to implement a distributed system as a computational grid, based on the ideas of two scientists working in the United States, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman. Together, these two had developed a concept which allowed computing centers to inter-connect in a very general way, integrating their separate resources to offer a single virtual computing service."

You can find the article here.

User Perspectives Report Available

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:27:10 -0600

We are happy to announce the report, Perspectives on Distributed Computing: Thirty People, Four User Types, and the Distributed Computing User Experience, is available for download. This report chronicles and analyzes the responses of thirty users to questions about using the Globus Toolkit - starting with summaries of results and conclusions but also including very detailed appendices and even transcripts of the interviews. Very interesting information for those involved in distributed computing:

http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~childers/perspectives/

Globus GSoC projects featured on Google Open Source blog

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:11:05 -0600

Globus' projects for last year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) are featured on the Google Open Source blog. The posting describes all the interesting work our GSoC students did last summer:

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/01/globus-alliances-first-google-summer-of.html

IWSGC'09 - Call for Participants

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:12:07 -0600

International Winter School in Grid Computing 2009

http://www.iceage-eu.org/iwsgc09/

PLEASE forward this information to your colleagues who might be interested.

Overview

The 2nd International Winter School in Grid Computing (IWSGC'09) will bring together world experts and enthusiastic students. It will be delivered fully online: participants will be able to attend the School without losing time and money on traveling. It will examine the conceptual and practical underpinnings of today's grids. Experts will provide exciting practical exercises, discuss the challenges of building and sustaining e-Infrastructure, report its rapid influence on the way we research, design and make decisions. They will share their vision of the developments and challenges ahead. Comparable in commitment and scope with the famous International Summer School in Grid Computing (ISSGC), the International Winter School in Grid Computing provides a unique online educational opportunity.

Rigorous both in admission requirements and expected work commitment, IWSGC retains the majority of learner benefits from ISSGC while offering a high degree of flexibility. Re-used Summer School materials will tackle the principles, technologies, experiences and methods of using Grids. They will also review the research perspectives and report recent significant successes. Opportunities will be available for online practical exercises. The work will be both challenging and rewarding. Extensive Forum and Chat discussions as well as live events will support the curriculum and help students to form lasting friendships and enhance collaborative research.

To support the hands-on laboratory sessions, the GILDA grid will host widely used middleware. This testbed will provide a rich environment for hands-on learning and experimentation. Exercises and team work will encourage students to learn by using this testbed. Students will be fired up with enthusiasm, equipped with practical skills and will leave the course with many shared experiences, new friends and a new capacity for research into and using advanced distributed computing systems. The target audience will include enthusiastic and ambitious young researchers who expect to use or develop grids in their research. We look forward to greeting participants from virtually every continent, from any country. Applications are invited from researchers who have recently started (or are about to start) working on Grid projects. Students may be planning to pioneer or enable new forms of e-Infrastructure, engage in fundamental distributed systems research or to develop new methods in any discipline that depends on the emerging capabilities of e-Infrastructure.

Applications

In all previous incarnations of the Summer School, and last year's Winter School, the level of applications has been of an extremely high standard and we have received more applications than places available. Selection for the Winter School is therefore competitive based on the information supplied on the application form and by an applicant's referee. We expect to accept between 25 and 30 students. We will be looking for students with commitment and enthusiasm for Grid research and development. We will expect competence and experience in some aspects of software development, distributed systems, computational systems, data systems and Grid applications. Most students will establish their credentials from academic qualifications, but some will base this on experience. We also welcome as participants educators who are planning to teach Grid computing. The Winter School will be conducted in English, so participants are expected to be comfortable using spoken and written English. We expect participants from computer science, computational science and any application discipline. The School will assume that students have diverse backgrounds and will build on that diversity.

Important Dates

24th November 2008: Applications open
12th January 2009: Applications closed

Best regards,

IWSGC09 Programme Committee
School Website: http://www.iceage-eu.org/iwsgc09/
E-mail: IWSGC@lists.nesc.ac.uk

Nimbus eScience 2008 talk

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:22:36 -0600

How to make a virtual cluster with one click: Kate will talk about our work on automated virtual cluster deployment at the eScience conference on Thursday, December 11th at 1:30 pm.

Our virtual cluster deployment tools have been used to create production virtual clusters for scientific applications on EC2 as well as the Science Clouds for the past year.

And speaking of Science Clouds and virtual clusters: Mauricio Tsugawa will talk about CloudBLAST and Ewa Deelman will talk about Montage virtual clusters.

Science Cloud Available at Purdue University for TeraGrid users

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:20:50 -0600

The Wispy compute cloud at Purdue University is available. For more information, see http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/teragrid/resources/#wispy.

Article describes GT4-based data mining grid [IEEE Computer Society]

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:46:39 -0600

From "Digging Deep into the Data Mine with DataMiningGrid" published by the IEEE Computer Society:

As modern data mining applications increase in complexity, so too do their demands for resources. Grid computing is one of several emerging networked computing paradigms promising to meet the requirements of heterogeneous, large-scale, and distributed data mining applications. Despite this promise, there are still too many issues to be resolved before grid technology is commonly applied to large-scale data mining tasks. To address some of these issues, the authors developed the DataMiningGrid system. It integrates a diverse set of programs and application scenarios within a single framework, and features scalability, flexible extensibility, sophisticated support for relevant standards and different users.

You can download the article here: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/news/StankovskiEtAlIEEEIC.pdf.

Globus Toolkit 4.2.1 Now Available

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:52:22 -0500

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new stable release of the Globus Toolkit is now available. New users are encouraged to use the 4.2.1 release. Existing users of GT4.0.x may wish to evaluate the new software while maintaining their existing installations; due to the specification upgrade, the webservices in 4.2.1 are incompatible with the 4.0.x series.

Relevant 4.2.1 links:

Thanks for your support of Globus software!

Highlights of this release include:

C GSI now has better handling of server identity processing: http://bugzilla.globus.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6331
XACML authorization callout added: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.1/security/wsaajava/pdp/wsaajava-pdp-XACMLAuthzCallout.html
Improved GRAM4 Audit Logging: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.1/rn/#gram4-changessummary
Merged in many VDT patches: http://bugzilla.globus.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6192
JPA Persistence support: http://bugzilla.globus.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5616
JNDI Configuration improvements: http://bugzilla.globus.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6306

CoG JGlobus 1.6.0 Release

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:49:14 -0500

We're happy to announce CoG JGlobus 1.6.0. This is mostly a bug fix release. For details, please take a look at http://dev.globus.org/wiki/CoG_JGlobus_1.6.0

Our plan is to try to synchronize JGlobus releases with Globus Toolkit releases. So if everything goes according to the plan, this will be used in the upcoming Globus Toolkit 4.2.1 release.

Please enjoy and thanks for using our software.

The CoG JGlobus Project Committers

Advisories RSS Feeds Available

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:04:12 -0500

You can now subscribe to RSS feeds for advisories to supported versions of the Globus Toolkit.

Just go to the Advisories page:

http://www.globus.org/toolkit/advisories.html

select either of the supported versions from the drop-down list (default is GT 4.2) and scroll down to find the orange XML button.