Globus Toolkit 3.0 delivers Grid standards

SAN DIEGO (Jan. 13, 2003) — Grid computing takes a major step forward today with the first implementation of emerging standards known as the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). The Globus Project ™ issued its alpha release of the Globus Toolkit 3.0 (GT3), a set of open-source software and services whose earlier versions have transformed the way on-line resources are shared across organizations.

GT3’s release, which coincides with the first GlobusWorld conference this week in San Diego, is the result of the past year’s effort toward defining specifications for Grid services that extend standard Web services. The OGSA-based alpha version builds on prior releases of the Globus Toolkit, which is central to hundreds of science and engineering projects on the Grid.

The Globus Project also announced that other leading Grid participants are committing to use of GT3 and OGSA. Companies include Avaki, Cray, Entropia, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, Platform Computing, Silicon Graphics, Inc., Sun Microsystems, and Veridian. Research projects include FusionGrid, TeraGrid, the Department of Energy Science Grid, the Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN), the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative. A collection of quotes about GT3 by these partners is at www.globus.org/about/news/prGT3quotes03-02-12.html.

“We’re enthused about this latest Globus Toolkit release,” said Ian Foster, associate division director for mathematics and computer science at Argonne National Laboratory and professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. “The Grid’s promise of seamlessly sharing resources across distributed organizations takes another major step towards realization with GT3 and its implementation of the OGSA standards. The array of partners that we have assembled demonstrates the power of combining open source and open standards with industrial investment.”

Foster is co-leader of the Globus Project with colleagues Carl Kesselman (professor of computer science at the University of Southern California and director of the USC Information Sciences Institute’s Center for Grid Technologies) and Steve Tuecke (lead architect of Argonne's Distributed Systems Laboratory).

GT3 will benefit from an expanding community of developers who are closely involved in helping to develop Grid standards through the Global Grid Forum (GGF), a community-based organization with public- and private-sector contributors. For example, the UK e-Science program is leading the GGF’s OGSA Database Access and Integration (DAIS) working group to build database capabilities into OGSA and GT3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is also contributing directly to the GT3 code base.

“GT3 provides a major step forward in the functionality provided by the Globus Toolkit,” said Kesselman. “However, of equal importance is that GT3 builds on OGSA, which in turn builds on Web services. By leveraging widely supported commodity technologies, we can lower the barrier of entry to the deployment of Grids and the development of Grid technologies. As a consequence, we expect to see the base of GT3 deployment to extend into new and important user communities.”

The GT3 beta release will be in spring 2003, with official release in summer 2003, Tuecke emphasized. “The term ‘alpha’ means code that works to the best of its developers’ knowledge, but is not final or bug-free,” he said. “Support for the alpha release will be on a best-effort basis, because the Globus Project development team will be focused largely on improving the implementation for future releases.”

Development of GT3 is sponsored primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science’s Mathematical, Information and Computational Sciences Division, as well as by industry partners IBM and Microsoft Research.

"Grid technologies are essential to the scientific mission of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)," said Ed Oliver, Associate Director for the DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Research Office (ASCR). "ASCR has long supported this type of fundamental R&D both to further the study of computer science, and to add important new capabilities to energy-related research. We are also gratified by the Grid's broad impact in commercial computing, which is a secondary but important benefit."

About the Globus Project

The Globus Project conducts research and development to create the fundamental technologies behind the "Grid," which lets people share computing power, databases, and other tools securely online across corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy. The project's open source Globus Toolkit™ includes software services and libraries for resource monitoring, discovery, and management, plus security and file management. The toolkit is central to science and engineering projects that total nearly a half-billion dollars internationally, and it is the substrate on which leading IT companies are building significant commercial Grid products. The Globus Toolkit 2.0 received a 2002 R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine, which further honored the toolkit as 2002’s “Most Promising New Technology.” The Globus Project is based at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. For more information, see www.globus.org.

The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory conducts basic and applied scientific research across a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from high-energy physics to climatology and biotechnology. Since 1990, Argonne has worked with more than 600 companies and numerous federal agencies and other organizations to help advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for the future. Argonne is operated by the University of Chicago as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratory system.

For more information, please see the GT3 fact sheet online or contact Tom Garritano (630/667-4434 or garritano@mcs.anl.gov) at Argonne.