Globus Toolkit 3.0 delivers grid standardsSan Diego 13 January 2003 The Globus Project issued its alpha release of the Globus Toolkit 3.0 (GT3), a set of open-source software and services. This is the first implementation of emerging standards known as the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
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.
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 organisation with public- and private-sector contributors. For example, the UK e-Science programme 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", stated Carl 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, as Steve Tuecke, lead architect of the ANL Distributed Systems Laboratory, emphasised. "The term alpha? means code that works to the best of its developers? knowledge, but is not final or bug-free. 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)", stated 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."
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