- As mentioned earlier, many companies and others use the
term "grid," but without adhering to any particular definition
or standard. In the future, there may be a tighter definition
of what it takes to be "grid," but for now it's not unexpected
that people will form their own definitions.
- The biggest piece of today's grid, though, is based on
the Globus Toolkit. This
is a large and complex software package that provides many
types of functionality for grid computing. Globus is free and
open source, developed primarily in Java. It is the complexity
of Globus, as well as the difficulties many sites have in
getting Globus and related software/systems configured, that
inspired this talk.
- Globus is in early testing its third major revision, scheduled
for release this fall.
- Version 2.4, released a few years ago, is the basis for
some production services including the National Teragrid.
- Version 3.3.0 is the current release. It has similar
functionality to 2.4, but many changes to APIs.
- Version 4.0 is in early testing (as 3.9.1). It will
utilize existing Web services software and standards
for communication, rather than implementing something similar
to Web services itself.
- OGSA, mentioned earlier, is the working group with
the Global Grid Forum primarily responsible for standardizing
how the grid works: communication, authentication, resource
allocation, scheduling, etc. As such, OGSA is central to
all the other GGF efforts.
- Basic facts about the Globus Toolkit (ftp://ftp.globus.org):
- Over 80MB
- Over 250000 lines of Java code; ant XML installer; WSDL/GWSDL
- Sophisticated? Definitely. Complex? You bet.
- TODO: get statistical bug info;
Are any of those bugs security-related? Statistically, you can
count on it.
- As part of his own implementation of Globus 3.2, gbn wrote
up some installation procedures
he used. It was not a simple matter to get Globus up and
running.
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