Globus Toolkit

It has been suggested that Grid Resource Allocation Manager be merged into this article or section. ()

The Globus Toolkit, currently at version 4, is an open source toolkit for building computing grids developed and provided by the Globus Alliance.

Standards implementation

The Globus Toolkit is an implementation of the following standards:

• Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)
• Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) -- originally intended to form the basic “plumbing” layer for OGSA, but has been superseded by WSRF and WS-Management.
• Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF)
• Job Submission Description Language (JSDL)
• Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA)
• WS-Management
• WS-BaseNotification
• SOAP
• WSDL
• Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI)

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

Compatible third-party software

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

• WebCom and WebCom-G [2]
• Nimrod tools for meta-scheduling and parametric computing
• Gridbus Grid Service Broker
• Grid Portal Software such as GridPort, OGCE and GridSphere
• Grid Packaging Toolkit (GPT)
• MPICH-G2 (Grid Enabled MPI)
• Network Weather Service (NWS) (Quality-of-Service monitoring and statistics)
• Condor (CPU Cycle Scavenging) and Condor-G (Job Submission)
• HPC4U Middleware (Fault Tolerant and SLA aware Grid Middleware)
• GridWay metascheduler

XML-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 Hat.

Job schedulers

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

• Condor High-Throughput Computing System, a software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks.
• Load Sharing Facility, a commercial computer software job scheduler.
• Portable Batch System, a computer software job scheduler that allocates network resources to batch jobs.

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

• Sun Grid Engine, an open source batch-queuing system, supported by Sun Microsystems. 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.

External links

• Globus Toolkit homepage