Globus 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 .

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.
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

    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
  2. Information Services: Monitoring and Discovery Service
  3. Security Services: Grid Security Infrastructure
  4. Data Movement and Management: Global Access to Secondary Storage and GridFTP
The following Globus Toolkit components are supported by the OGF-defined SAGA C++/Python API:
  1. GRAM 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, 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:
The Globus Alliance announced a release of Globus Toolkit version 5 in late 2009. A major change will be abandoning GRAM4 in favor of an enhanced GRAM2, called GRAM5, which will solve scalability issues and add features. The Reliable File Transfer service will be replaced by a new Globus.org service. Globus.org is an online, hosted 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 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. No releases of the IIS are planned until sometime in 2010.
The release of GT 5.0.2 was on 19 July 2010. GT 5.0.3 is reported due for release in February 2011.

Use