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Related Tools

A strength of the Globus Toolkit has always been the many complementary tools developed by other groups. The number of such tools continues to grow, and with GT4 we dedicate a section of the Globus Toolkit Website to describing their features and how they can be used in conjunction with GT4 to address application requirements.

Among the many featured tools are the Nimrod-G parameter study system, the Condor-G job submission tool, the Ninf-G remote procedure call system, the Grid Resource Management System (GRMS) metascheduler, and the Open Grid Computing Environment (OGCE) software for portals. Related software includes GRAM interfaces for Condor, Platform's Load Sharing Facility, Sun Grid Engine, and the Portable Batch System, as well as group membership and authorization services accessible via the new authorization framework.

Conclusions

GT4 has been in the hands of early users for nearly a year now and has been tested extensively by both the Globus Toolkit development team and hundreds of early adopters. These early users report major improvements relative to previous Globus Toolkit releases in the areas of user experience, features, and performance.

We are grateful for the substantial investment in usability and performance made by the National Science Foundation and IBM, combined with the core research and development support provided by NSF, DOE, NASA, DARPA, the European Commission, the UK Research Councils, IBM, and Microsoft. Moreover, we believe that the personal investments in time and effort to learn about and use GT4 in hundreds of science, engineering, and business projects will clearly pay off in personal and professional accomplishments.

Continued support of Grid computing is possible only when success stories are known and shared with others. We'd like to hear about your success stories! (Problems are always of interest to us as well.) We encourage users to send e-mail to info (at) globus (dot) org with interesting experiences using GT4.

Sidebar One: Something For Everyone
Everyone who currently uses the Globus Toolkit should find something new to be happy about in GT4.

Web service developers:

  • Improved WS Core performance
  • Upgrade to latest Web service specifications

Security architects:

  • Support for HTTPs, WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, and WS-I Basic Security Profile
  • Addition of MyProxy and CAS
  • Interoperability with VOMS, PERMIS, and other SAML-based authorization systems

Network engineers:

  • Extremely fast GridFTP server that includes a striped server configuration
  • Reliable File Transfer and Replica Location Services that optimize network use

Computational scientists:

  • Remote job submission service that scales well under high loads
  • Improved and expanded documentation and training materials

This article was originally published in ClusterWorld Magazine. It has been updated and formated for the web. If you want to read more about HPC clusters and Linux you may wish to visit Linux Magazine.

Lee Liming is manager of the Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL) at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. Ian Foster is the Associate Division Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division Argonne National Laboratory and Professor of Computer Science University of Chicago.

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