Globus Toolkit

From GridInfo

The Globus Toolkit - developed by the Globus Alliance - defines a set of individual protocols and tools, in the area of resource management, data management, security, etc. enabling users to build computational grids and share resources across organizational boundaries, without compromising site autonomy.

It does not aim to provide a complete solution to the "Grid" problem, but instead consists of a number of independent tools and components that can be brought together to build computational grids.

Components of interst are:

• The Globus Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM): which provides a standard interface for jobs (in the form of executable binaries), to be run on a range of remote computational processing software systems (such as Condor, Sun Grid Engine, PBS, etc.), and supports job submission, monitoring and termination on remote resources.

• The Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI): Enables secure authentication and communication over an open network. It is based on a public key infrastructure and X.509 certificates, and provides support for delegation, which enables remote servers to perform service invocations on behalf of the user, and credential mappings, which enable Grid certificates to be mapped to site-specific local configurations and authentication/authorization mechanisms.

• Data Grid Features: The globus toolkit provides a number of data handling tools such as GridFTP - a high performance secure reliable data transfer protocol optimized for high bandwidth wide area networks, which is based on FTP - and the Globus Replica Catalog - which provides mapping between logical names and names of the file replicas on the physical storage systems.

• Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS) to collect information about resource (processing capacity, bandwidth capacity, type of storage, etc)

• Grid Resource Information Service (GRIS) to query resources for their current configuration, capabilities, and status
• Grid Index Information Service (GIIS) which coordinates arbitrary GRIS services

Links

• Globus Project main page
• How to install Globus 4.0.1
• Using Globus 4.0.1 at NIEeS
• Terminology used in Globus
• Wikipedia article on Globus Toolkit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit