Special Features:
GRID SOFTWARE WILL NEED TO
BRING PEOPLE & BUSINESSES TOGETHER
Programmers writing software for the Grid are coming to the realizization
that they will need to address the issue of compatibility between the user
community and the business community.
One such group of developers is involved with the Globus Toolkit
program.
This open-source software has been used to bring together groups of
servers, networks, and other systems into a single area of computing. Now they
have finally released another version that allows users to get into Grids
through the Web.
According to Ian Foster, "It aligns very clearly with what's going on in
the industry. " "It provides the power of Web services, in terms of
standardways of describing and discovering and publishing services on the
network,with the power of grid computing."
The Globus Toolkit has used its own standards, but developers are moving to
Web services standards so the software will more easily integrate with
business computing infrastructure, said Ian Foster, one of the three lead
developers behind the toolkit.
Web services are a host of technologies sweeping the computing industry,
standardizing next-generation Internet processes such as advertising what
capabilities a computer has or governing who has permission to use a certain
computers on the network.
The move is a concrete part of a plan to bridge the academic supercomputing
realm with the business computing. In a related move, Hewlett-Packard
announced it has written software than can link grids and the computing
infrastructure governed by HP's Utility Data Center system.
The Globus change not only will help business customers' use the toolkit,
but also will help increase the number of developers working on the software,
Foster said. Current contributors to the project include IBM, Sun
Microsystems, HP, Microsoft, Platform Computing, Hitachi, NEC, Fujitsu, Avaki
and Entropia.
Grid computing unites pools of servers, storage systems and networks into
one large system. Globus Toolkit handles connections between different groups
of computers, working in conjunction with software such as Platform
Computing's Load Sharing Facility or Sun's GridEngine that assigns tasks to
computers within a group.
The new features for Globus come through an effort called the Open Grid
Services Architecture (OGSA).
Ian Foster is associate division director for mathematics and computer
science at Argonne National Laboratory. Other leaders of the Globus effort,
which began in 1995, are Carl Kesselman, professor of computer science at the
University of Southern California and director of USC's Center for Grid
Technologies, and Steve Tuecke, lead architect of the Argonne Distributed
Systems Laboratory.
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