Globus Toolkit
Encyclopedia
The Globus Toolkit, currently at version 5, is an open source
toolkit for building computing grids
developed and provided by the Globus Alliance
.
The Globus Toolkit has implementations of the OGF-defined protocols to provide:
The following Globus Toolkit components are supported by the OGF-defined SAGA C++/Python API
:
XML
-based web services offer a way to access the diverse services and applications in a distributed environment.
.
), a component of the Globus Toolkit, officially supports the following job scheduler
s or batch-queuing systems:
Unofficial job scheduler
s that can be used with the Globus Toolkit:
The release of GT 5.0.2 was announced on 19 July 2010. GT 5.0.3 is reported due for release in February 2011.
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
toolkit for building computing grids
Grid computing
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
developed and provided by the Globus Alliance
Globus Alliance
The Globus Alliance is an international association dedicated to developing fundamental technologies needed to build grid computing infrastructures...
.
Standards implementation
The Globus Toolkit is an implementation of the following standards:- Open Grid Services ArchitectureOpen Grid Services ArchitectureThe Open Grid Services Architecture describes an architecture for a service-oriented grid computing environment for business and scientific use, developed within the Global Grid Forum...
(OGSA) - Open Grid Services InfrastructureOpen Grid Services InfrastructureThe Open Grid Services Infrastructure was published by the Global Grid Forum as a proposed recommendation in June 2003. It was intended to provide an infrastructure layer for the Open Grid Services Architecture...
(OGSI) -- originally intended to form the basic “plumbing” layer for OGSA, but has been superseded by WSRF and WS-Management. - Web Services Resource FrameworkWeb Services Resource FrameworkWeb Services Resource Framework is a family of OASIS-published specifications for web services. Major contributors include the Globus Alliance and IBM.A web service by itself is nominally stateless, i.e., it retains no data between invocations...
(WSRF) - Job Submission Description LanguageJob Submission Description LanguageJob Submission Description Language is an extensible XML specification from the Global Grid Forum for the description of simple tasks to non-interactive computer execution systems...
(JSDL) - Distributed Resource Management Application APIDRMAADRMAA or Distributed Resource Management Application API is a high-level Open Grid Forum API specification for the submission and control of jobs to a Distributed Resource Management system, such as a Cluster or Grid computing infrastructure...
(DRMAA) - WS-ManagementWS-ManagementWeb Services-Management is a DMTF open standard defining a SOAP-based protocol for the management of servers, devices, applications and various Web services. The DMTF has published the standards document DSP0226 with version v1.1.0 of 2010-03-03....
- WS-BaseNotificationWS-BaseNotificationWS-BaseNotification is a web services specification which defines the interface WS-Notification clients and servers should expose.- Subscription :...
- SOAP
- WSDLWeb Services Description LanguageThe Web Services Description Language is an XML-based language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a Web service. A WSDL description of a web service provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects and what data structures...
- Grid Security InfrastructureGrid Security InfrastructureThe Grid Security Infrastructure , formerly called the Globus Security Infrastructure, is a specification for secret, tamper-proof, delegatable communication between software in a grid computing environment...
(GSI)
The Globus Toolkit has implementations of the OGF-defined protocols to provide:
- Resource managementResource managementIn organizational studies, resource management is the efficient and effective deployment of an organization's resources when they are needed. Such resources may include financial resources, inventory, human skills, production resources, or information technology...
: Grid Resource Allocation & Management Protocol (GRAM) - Information Services: Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS)
- Security Services: Grid Security InfrastructureGrid Security InfrastructureThe Grid Security Infrastructure , formerly called the Globus Security Infrastructure, is a specification for secret, tamper-proof, delegatable communication between software in a grid computing environment...
(GSI) - Data Movement and Management: Global Access to Secondary Storage (GASS) and GridFTPGridFTPGridFTP is an extension of the standard File Transfer Protocol for use with Grid computing. It is defined as part of the Globus toolkit, under the organisation of the Global Grid Forum ....
The following Globus Toolkit components are supported by the OGF-defined SAGA C++/Python API
SAGA C++ Reference Implementation
The SAGA C++ Reference Implementation is a set of free cross-platform libraries written in C++ and Python which provide a set of high-level interfaces and runtime components that allow the development of distributed computing and grid computing applications, frameworks and tools...
:
- GRAM (2 and 5) via the SAGA job API
- GridFTPGridFTPGridFTP is an extension of the standard File Transfer Protocol for use with Grid computing. It is defined as part of the Globus toolkit, under the organisation of the Global Grid Forum ....
via the SAGA filesystem API - Replica Location Service via the SAGA replica API
Compatible third-party software
A number of tools can function with Globus Toolkit, including:- SAGA C++ Reference ImplementationSAGA C++ Reference ImplementationThe SAGA C++ Reference Implementation is a set of free cross-platform libraries written in C++ and Python which provide a set of high-level interfaces and runtime components that allow the development of distributed computing and grid computing applications, frameworks and tools...
- The Simple API for Grid Applications - WebCom and WebCom-G http://www.cuc.ucc.ie/
- NimrodNimrod (distributed computing)Nimrod is a tool for the parameterisation of serial programs to create and execute embarrassingly parallel programs over a computational grid. Nimrod was one of the first tools to make use of heterogeneous resources in a grid for a single computation. It was also an early example of using a...
tools for meta-scheduling and parametric computing - Gridbus Grid Service Broker
- Grid Portal Software such as GridPort, OGCE, GridSphere and P-GRADE Portal
- Grid Packaging Toolkit (GPT)
- MPICH-G2 (Grid Enabled MPIMessage Passing InterfaceMessage Passing Interface is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers...
) - Network Weather Service (NWS) (Quality-of-Service monitoring and statistics)
- CondorCondor cycle scavengerCondor is an open source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks....
(CPU Cycle Scavenging) and Condor-G (Job Submission) - HPC4U Middleware (Fault Tolerant and SLA aware Grid Middleware)
- GridWayGridWayGridWay is an open source meta-scheduling technology that enables large-scale, secure, reliable and efficient sharing of computing resources , managed by different DRM systems, such as Sun Grid Engine, Condor, PBS, Load Sharing Facility..., within a single organization or scattered...
metascheduler
XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
-based web services offer a way to access the diverse services and applications in a distributed environment.
Globus distributions
In 2004 Univa Corporation began providing commercial support for the Globus Toolkit using a business model similar to that of Red HatRed Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....
.
Job schedulers
GRAM (Grid Resource Allocation ManagerGrid Resource Allocation Manager
Globus Resource Allocation Manager is a software component of the Globus Toolkit that can locate, submit, monitor, and cancel jobs on Grid computing resources...
), a component of the Globus Toolkit, officially supports the following job scheduler
Job scheduler
A job scheduler is a software application that is in charge of unattended background executions, commonly known for historical reasons as batch processing....
s or batch-queuing systems:
- Portable Batch SystemPortable Batch SystemPortable Batch System is the name of computer software that performs job scheduling. Its primary task is to allocate computational tasks, i.e., batch jobs, among the available computing resources...
, a computer software job schedulerJob schedulerA job scheduler is a software application that is in charge of unattended background executions, commonly known for historical reasons as batch processing....
that allocates network resources to batch jobs. - Condor High-Throughput Computing System, a software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks.
- Platform LSFLoad Sharing FacilityLoad Sharing Facility is a commercial computer software job scheduler sold by Platform Computing. It can be used to execute batch jobs on networked Unix and Windows systems on many different architectures....
, a commercial computer software job schedulerJob schedulerA job scheduler is a software application that is in charge of unattended background executions, commonly known for historical reasons as batch processing....
.
Unofficial job scheduler
Job scheduler
A job scheduler is a software application that is in charge of unattended background executions, commonly known for historical reasons as batch processing....
s that can be used with the Globus Toolkit:
- Sun Grid EngineSun Grid EngineOracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine , previously known as CODINE or GRD , is an open source batch-queuing system, developed and supported by Sun Microsystems...
, an open source batch-queuing system, supported by Sun MicrosystemsSun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
. Globus does not officially support SGE, but third parties offer methods to integrate it:- The London e-Science Center has created a "Transfer-queue over Globus (TOG)" package and provides instructions on how to configure a Globus Toolkit 2 or 3 or a Globus Toolkit 4 server so that it can submit jobs for execution on a local Sun Grid Engine installation.
- Other commercial solutions are available for integrating SGE into Globus Toolkit also.
- Simple Linux Utility for Resource ManagementSimple Linux Utility for Resource ManagementSimple Linux Utility for Resource Management is an opensource job scheduler used by many of the world's supercomputers and computer clusters. It provides three key functions. First it allocates exclusive and/or non-exclusive access to resources to users for some duration of time so they can...
(SLURM), an open source batch-queuing system developed by LLNL. Globus can be used with SLURM via shell wrappers.
Development plans
The Globus Alliance has announced a release of Globus Toolkit version 5 (GT5) in late 2009.http://www.mail-archive.com/gt-user@lists.globus.org/msg01311.htmlhttp://www.globus.org/news.html#161 A major change will be abandoning GRAM4 (although continuing support at least through December, 2010) in favor of an enhanced GRAM2, called GRAM5, which will solve scalability issues and add features. The Reliable File Transfer (RFT) service will be replaced by a new Globus.org service. Globus.org is an online, hosted service (i.e., Software-as-a-Service) that provides higher-level, end-to-end Grid capabilities, initially concentrating on reliable, high-performance, fire-and-forget data transfer. To retain the Web-Service functionality without technology and standards now considered obsolete, a new project called Globus Crux http://confluence.globus.org/display/whi/Crux+for+GT+Developers has been started, which expects to release an alpha version by the end of 2009. The monitoring and discovery tasks currently performed by MDS will be taken up by a new, Crux-based Integrated Information Services (IIS). No releases of the IIS are planned until sometime in 2010.The release of GT 5.0.2 was announced on 19 July 2010. GT 5.0.3 is reported due for release in February 2011.
Use
- caGridCaGridThe cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG is an initiative of the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. The caGrid computer network and software support caBIG....
is layered on Globus Java WS Core - ARCAdvanced Resource ConnectorAdvanced Resource Connector is grid computing middleware introduced by NorduGrid. ARC is an open source software distributed under the Apache License.- History :...
- Advanced Resource Connector open source grid middleware introduced by NorduGridNorduGrid] NorduGrid is a collaboration aiming at development, maintenance and support of the free Grid middleware, known as the Advanced Resource Connector .- History :...