Blog

The Globus command line interface, or CLI, provides access to the Globus service via a restricted command shell. We continue to streamline the Globus CLI, and will be making changes in an upcoming release to better align the CLI as a tool for interactive and simple scripting use.

The following changes will be made to the CLI in the upcoming release:

We continue to build out premium capabilities for administering endpoints. The management console, which is now in production, was recently updated with features that allow endpoint administrators to cancel or pause tasks on their endpoints.

The winner of our 100PB contest is Todd Raeker from the University of Michigan. Todd came closest in predicting the date and time at which Globus would pass the 100PB mark. We passed 100PB at 3:36:14pm CDT on June 26, 2015. Todd's prediction: 11:11:11pm CDT on July 4, 2015. Congratulations, Todd!

Last week we passed a pretty cool milestone for the Globus service: 100 petabytes of data moved! Even in this age of "big data", 100PB is a big number. How big, you ask? Well, 100PB is roughly...

...twice the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of history, in all languages,
...1,000 times all of Twitter,
...8.88 million hours of HD video,
...21,276,596 DVDs,
...50 times all the material in US academic libraries,
...5 times the entire production of disk drives in 1995 (yeah, that's a pretty obscure one).

We're thrilled to see NCAR using Globus to distribute data from their Research Data Archive (RDA). The RDA contains a large and diverse collection of meteorological and oceanographic observations, operational and reanalysis model outputs, and remote sensing datasets to support atmospheric and geosciences research.

On May 20th, 2015, a new vulnerability known as “Logjam” was discovered, as described in this NIST announcement. We reviewed the severity and impact to Globus services and posted the findings in our support forum. We do not anticipate additional updates on this issue.

A new feature that allows users to delegate management of shared endpoints was demonstrated at GlobusWorld 2015. This feature allows the creator of a shared endpoint to assign the access manager role to select users, giving those users the ability to grant or revoke read/write access privileges for the shared endpoint.

Knowledge Lab is a University of Chicago research center that seeks to leverage insights into the dynamics of knowledge creation and advances in large-scale computation to reimagine the scientific processes of the future by identifying gaps in the global knowledge landscape, areas of rich potential for breakthroughs, and automating discovery through the generation of novel, potentially high impact hypotheses.
 

We've talked a lot recently about data publication and inevitably the conversation becomes one of definition and semantics. For many, data publication means making publicly available the data used to support the results described in a published paper. For some, it means making data selectively available to other investigators within a research discipline or community. For others, it means sharing research findings with collaborators at multiple institutions throughout the course of a project. And, as you might imagine, there are myriad scenarios in between these three.

We recently released a management console for Globus, reflecting our commitment to help resource providers deliver an outstanding research data management service to users at their institution. The console can be used to monitor activity on endpoints, and to identify and troubleshoot faults that may indicate underlying infrastructure issues. We will continue to enhance the management console, adding the ability to suspend, resume, and cancel transfer requests, and get usage metrics.