Blog

GlobusWorld 2014 took place in Chicago last week and it was a great success, drawing more than 120 HPC computing experts and scientists to Argonne National Lab for the three-day event. Attendees participated in tutorials illuminating the full range of Globus capabilities, learned how different campuses are thriving with Provider Plans and Globus Plus, and heard about cutting-edge genomic research supported by Globus Genomics.

Two weeks after the discovery of the Heartbleed bug we’re still actively monitoring the situation and fixing systems that might be at risk. After updating software and certificates, we believe that our systems are no longer vulnerable to Heartbleed. We maintain a detailed list of the corrective actions we've taken in our support forum.

By now, almost every system administrator on the planet is aware of the OpenSSL vulnerability (also known as the Heartbleed bug). Since its announcement we've been hard at work reviewing all Globus services and software components to figure out which of them, if any, are vulnerable.

In the stock markets, the so-called "January Effect" is the increase in stock prices during the month of January that commentators attribute to investors buying stocks after having sold them during the previous December (usually for tax reasons). Unlike most January's, last month the markets experienced a steep drop—the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 5.3% from its 2013 year-end level. But I'm happy to say that the January Effect is alive and well at Globus!

I am pleased to honor Joel Brownstein from the University of Utah as the Globus User of the Month for December 2013. Professor Joel Brownstein is the data archivist of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-IV (SDSS-IV), which is the continuation of the SDSS-I, -II, and -III surveys.

The SDSS-I, -II, and -III surveys have together amassed hundreds of terabytes of data from millions of stars throughout the Milky Way, and distant galaxies and quasars that allow us to study the structure and evolution of galaxies, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, and the cosmological history of the universe.

XSEDE just announced that Globus Connect Server (formerly called Globus Connect Multiuser) is now accepted for use in Campus Bridging. Campus Bridging efforts in XSEDE aim to lower the barriers for researchers that wish to utilize XSEDE resources and to define best practices for campus IT staff connecting to national cyberinfrastructure.

We had the pleasure of meeting this month’s honored users in person at the XSEDE13 Conference in San Diego last month. Brian Leu, Parth Sheth, and Albert Liu are all undergraduates at the University of Michigan. Brian answered my questions about how they use Globus Online to manage their undergraduate research data. We couldn't be happier that Globus Online has helped them continue their research over the summer--and that they've never known the difficulties of moving research data in the pre-Globus era!

Researchers who move data over the Internet with tools such as FTP on the TCP communication protocol to detect and retransmit data packets that have become corrupted in transit. It turns out that in doing so, they are leaning on an extremely weak reed. A 16-bit checksum means that 1 in 65,536 bad packets will be erroneously accepted as correct. You might think that corrupted packets are rare.

We just crossed the 10,000 mark for registered users and it made me think of the early days of Globus Online. Our first users were Shreyas Cholia, David Skinner, and others from NERSC, a very supportive group that helped us troubleshoot and refine pre-release versions of the file transfer service.

We just released Globus Connect Multiuser version 2. This is a major update over the previous version, featuring:

• Native packaging: Native RPM and Debian packages for more than a dozen Linux variants.
• Globus Toolkit integration: Globus Connect Multiuser is now a Globus Toolkit package, available from the standard Globus Toolkit repository, which leverages the other standard Globus Toolkit packages (e.g., GridFTP, MyProxy).
• Easy update: Once you have installed Globus Connect Multiuser v2, updates can be installed simply via standard, native package updates from our repo. And because Globus Connect Multiuser depends on the normal Globus Toolkit packages, any updates to Globus Toolkit (e.g., a GridFTP fix or new feature) are now instantly available with Globus Connect Multiuser. (Note: If you have a existing installation of a previous version of Globus Connect Multiuser, you should delete it and do a fresh installation of v2.)