News from the Globus Project
GLOBUS TOOLKIT 3.0 DELIVERS GRID STANDARDS
Alpha version of popular open source Grid software points the way to a
new generation of Grid services and applications
SAN DIEGO, January 13, 2003 Grid computing takes a major step forward
today with the first implementation of emerging standards known as the
Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). The Globus Project (TM) issued
its alpha release of the Globus Toolkit 3.0 (GT3), a set of open-source
software and services whose earlier versions have transformed the way
on-line resources are shared across organizations.
GT3's release, which coincides with the first GlobusWorld conference
this week in San Diego (http://www.globusworld.org), is the result of
the past year's effort toward defining specifications for Grid services
that extend standard Web services. The OGSA-based alpha version builds
on prior releases of the Globus Toolkit, which is central to hundreds of
science and engineering projects on the Grid.
The Globus Project also announced that other leading Grid participants
are committing to use of GT3 and OGSA. Companies include Avaki, Cray,
Entropia, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, Platform Computing, Silicon
Graphics, Inc., Sun Microsystems, and Veridian. Research projects
include FusionGrid, TeraGrid, the Department of Energy Science Grid, the
Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN), the Network for Earthquake Engineering
Simulation, the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory, and the
National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative. A collection of
quotes about GT3 by these partners is at
http://www.globus.org/about/news/prGT3quotes03-01-12.html.
"We're enthused about this latest Globus Toolkit release," said Ian
Foster, associate division director for mathematics and computer science
at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and professor of computer science
at the University of Chicago. "The Grid's promise of seamlessly sharing
resources across distributed organizations takes another major step
towards realization with GT3 and its implementation of the OGSA
standards. The array of partners that we have assembled demonstrates
the power of combining open source and open standards with industrial
investment."
Foster is co-leader of the Globus Project with colleagues
Carl Kesselman (professor of computer science at the University of
Southern California and director of the USC Information Sciences
Institute's Center for Grid Technologies) and Steve Tuecke (lead
architect of the ANL Distributed Systems Laboratory).
GT3 will benefit from an expanding community of developers who are
closely involved in helping to develop Grid standards through the Global
Grid Forum (GGF), a community-based organization with public- and
private-sector contributors. For example, the UK e-Science program is
leading the GGF's OGSA Database Access and Integration (DAIS) working
group to build database capabilities into OGSA and GT3. Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory is also contributing directly to the GT3
code base.
"GT3 provides a major step forward in the functionality provided by the
Globus Toolkit," said Kesselman. "However, of equal importance is that
GT3 builds on OGSA, which in turn builds on Web services. By leveraging
widely supported commodity technologies, we can lower the barrier of
entry to the deployment of Grids and the development of Grid
technologies. As a consequence, we expect to see the base of GT3
deployment to extend into new and important user communities."
The GT3 beta release will be in Spring 2003, with official release in
Summer 2003, Tuecke emphasized. "The term 'alpha' means code that works
to the best of its developers' knowledge, but is not final or bug-free,"
he said. "Support for the alpha release will be on a best-effort basis,
because the Globus Project development team will be focused largely on
improving the implementation for future releases."
Development of GT3 is sponsored primarily by the U.S. Department of
Energy through its Office of Science's Mathematical, Information and
Computational Sciences Division, as well as by industry partners IBM and
Microsoft Research.
"Grid technologies are essential to the scientific mission of the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE)," said Ed Oliver, Associate Director for the
DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Research Office (ASCR). "ASCR has
long supported this type of fundamental R&D both to further the study
of computer science, and to add important new capabilities to
energy-related research. We are also gratified by the Grid's broad
impact in commercial computing, which is a secondary but important
benefit."
About the Globus Project
The Globus Project conducts research and development to create the
fundamental technologies behind the "Grid," which lets people share
computing power, databases, and other tools securely online across
corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing
local autonomy. The project's open source Globus Toolkit (TM) includes
software services and libraries for resource monitoring, discovery, and
management, plus security and file management. The toolkit is central
to science and engineering projects that total nearly a half-billion
dollars internationally, and it is the substrate on which leading IT
companies are building significant commercial Grid products. The Globus
Toolkit 2.0 received a 2002 R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine, which
further honored the toolkit as 2002's "Most Promising New Technology."
The Globus Project is based at Argonne National Laboratory and the
University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. For
more information, see http://www.globus.org.
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For more information, see the http://www.globus.org/toolkit/. Media
queries: Tom Garritano, garritano@mcs.anl.gov and 630-667-4434.
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