vas's blog

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!

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 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.)

Earlier this week at the SC12 conference we announced a set of new services that we plan to launch early in 2013, including a simple, fast way to share big data directly from your own storage (without moving it to a cloud storage provider). We also announced that some of these future services will have a monthly fee associated with them, in keeping with our objective to make Globus Online a self-sustaining effort. We've received positive feedback on our development plans, as well as many questions, and I'd like to further expand on our announcement.

Our mission is to serve the data management needs of researchers at academic and non-profit institutions. In order for us to do this effectively, we must be able to sustain our operations—a task that is not easy to do within the traditional research funding environment. Federal agencies continue to support our core research through grants, but these grants are not intended to fund operating costs for things like cloud hosting resources, user support staff, and helpdesk software, among others. Our goal is to charge a modest fee to those researchers and projects who receive substantial value from our service, not so that we can make money, but so that we can sustain Globus Online over the long term.

In collaboration with the XSEDE Project, Globus Online is happy to announce support for MyProxy oAuth, an authentication and x509 credential retrieval service developed by the MyProxy Team at NCSA.

In “Anatomy of the Grid," published in 2001, Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tuecke posited that the central problem in Grid computing is “coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations.” 10 years later, the virtual organization problem is still a very much at the heart of multi-institutional scientific collaboration.

We’ve had a great couple days since Monday… see below for session highlights and some answers to questions that arose: Our sessions on “Globus and GridFTP: What’s New in 2011” and “Using Globus Online for Reliable, Secure File Transfer” each had fantastic turnouts with over 50 people in the room! Lots of love for Globus Online following the demos in particular, where many folks familiar with the complexities in setting up Globus appreciated GO's simplicity tremendously.

Globus Online is well represented at TG11 this year – we ran 2 tutorials on Monday, we’re delivering 2 talks today (on GO and GridFTP) and we’ve got a BOF later in the week.