Globus Toolkit

Last updated
Globus Toolkit
Developer(s) Globus Alliance
Stable release
5.2.5 / 2013
Operating system Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, HP-UX and AIX.
Platform PC
Type Grid computing
License Apache license
Website www.globus.org/toolkit/

The Globus Toolkit is an open-source toolkit for grid computing developed and provided by the Globus Alliance. On 25 May 2017 it was announced that the open source support for the project would be discontinued in January 2018 , due to a lack of financial support for that work. The Globus service continues to be available to the research community under a freemium approach, designed to sustain the software, with most features freely available but some restricted to subscribers .

In late 2017 the Grid Community Forum (GridCF) created a fork of the Globus Toolkit named the Grid Community Toolkit or GCT in short and took over maintenance and development of the code base. The GridCF added support for TLS 1.3 and also compatibility with OpenSSL 3.0 to its fork of the Globus Toolkit. GCT packages are available from EPEL/Fedora for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to 9 and compatible distributions and Fedora Linux, for Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu from the official package repositories and also SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE distributions from the Open Build Service.

Introduction

The Globus toolkit contains a set of libraries and programs that provides the developers of specific tools or apps with solutions for common problems that are encountered when creating a distributed system services and applications. [1]

Globus is a software with components and capabilities that includes:

  1. A set of service Implementations that Indicate resource management, data alterations service finding and relevant issues
  2. Tools for building web services
  3. A powerful standards-based security prerequisites for authentication and authorisation.
  4. Various services in java c and python for clients of API and command line programs
  5. Detailed documentation on these various components [2]

Standards implementation

The Globus Toolkit adheres to or provides implementations of the following standards:

The Globus Toolkit has implementations of the OGF-defined protocols to provide:

  1. Resource management: Grid Resource Allocation & Management Protocol (GRAM)
  2. Information Services: Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS)
  3. Security Services: Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI)
  4. Data Movement and Management: Global Access to Secondary Storage (GASS) and GridFTP

The following Globus Toolkit components are supported by the OGF-defined SAGA C++/Python API:

  1. GRAM (2 and 5) via the SAGA job API
  2. GridFTP via the SAGA filesystem API
  3. Replica Location Service via the SAGA C++ Reference Implementation API

Compatible third-party software

A number of tools can function with Globus Toolkit, including:

XML-based web services offer a way to access the diverse services and applications in a distributed environment.

In 2004, Univa Corporation began providing commercial support for the Globus Toolkit using a business model similar to that of Red Hat.

Job schedulers

GRAM (Grid Resource Allocation Manager), a component of the Globus Toolkit, officially supports the following job schedulers or batch-queuing systems:

Unofficial job schedulers that can be used with the Globus Toolkit:


Use

See also

Related Research Articles

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Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) describes a service-oriented architecture for a grid computing environment for business and scientific use. It was developed within the Open Grid Forum, which was called the Global Grid Forum (GGF) at the time, around 2002 to 2006.

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The Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) was published by the Global Grid Forum (GGF) as a proposed recommendation in June 2003. It was intended to provide an infrastructure layer for the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). OGSI takes the statelessness issues into account by essentially extending Web services to accommodate grid computing resources that are both transient and stateful.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Advanced Resource Connector</span> Grid computing software

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GridWay is an open-source meta-scheduling technology that enables large-scale, secure, reliable and efficient sharing of computing resources, managed by different distributed resource management systems (DRMS), such as SGE, HTCondor, PBS or LSF, within a single organization or scattered across several administrative domains. To this end, GridWay supports several Grid middlewares.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Grid Forum</span> Computing standards organization

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and produces documents with many acronyms such as OGSA, OGSI, and JSDL.

The Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA) is a family of related standards specified by the Open Grid Forum to define an application programming interface (API) for common distributed computing functionality.

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gLite Grid computing software

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The Globus Alliance is an international association founded by the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory dedicated to developing fundamental technologies needed to build grid computing infrastructures. The Globus Alliance was officially established in September 2003, out of the Globus Project that was established in 1995.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slurm Workload Manager</span> Free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and similar computers

The Slurm Workload Manager, formerly known as Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM), or simply Slurm, is a free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels, used by many of the world's supercomputers and computer clusters.

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References

  1. I.Foster. "Globus Toolkit Version 4: Software for Service-Oriented Systems" (PDF). Retrieved 13 Feb 2006.
  2. I. Foster, C. Kesselman. "The Globus Project: A Status Report" (PDF).
  3. FAQ: Can SLURM be used with Globus?