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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 8, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 36
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Special Features:
GLOBUS ALLIANCE
ESTABLISHED
By adding members from Scotland and Sweden, the Globus Project transformed
itself into the "Globus Alliance." Like the original Globus Project, the
Globus Alliance is a tightly integrated consortium dedicated to collaborative
design, development, testing and support of the open source Globus Toolkit,
the de facto standard Grid software.
The Globus Project was established in 1995 by the U.S. Argonne National
Laboratory, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences
Institute and the University of Chicago. New Globus Alliance partners are the
University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the Swedish Center for Parallel
Computers (PDC), which contribute database-integration and security expertise,
respectively. In addition, a new Academic Affiliates program with
participation from Asia-Pacific, Europe and the U.S. recognizes major
contributions to the Globus Toolkit by key members of the academic and
research communities, which gain a formal voice in Globus Alliance governance
with the creation of a new advisory council.
"We are delighted to announce this transition to the Globus Alliance, with
its
two new partners and Affiliates program," said Ian Foster, member of the new
Globus Alliance governing board, associate director of Argonne’s Mathematics
and Computer Science division and professor in the University of Chicago's
Computer Science department. "EPCC and PDC provide a much-needed European
dimension to the Globus virtual organization. This important step recognizes
the international scope of the Globus community, brings exciting new technical
capabilities and expands the set of people who, like us, live and breathe
Globus technologies."
The Globus Toolkit provides key enabling software and services that let
people
share computing power, databases and other tools securely online across
corporate, institutional and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local
autonomy. It has been deployed broadly worldwide for both science and industry
and has developed a strong community of contributors and users.
The Globus Alliance’s new governing board is structured to continue this
tradition of community engagement and careful design. In addition to Foster,
members include Malcolm Atkinson and Mark Parsons of Edinburgh and Olle Mulmo
and Lennart Johnsson at PDC, who join longtime Globus participants Carl
Kesselman and Karl Czajkowski of ISI and Steven Tuecke of Argonne. This board
takes on ultimate responsibility for Globus Toolkit design and governance.
EPCC developers and staff from the National e-Science Centre at Edinburgh
play
a leading role in the Global Grid Forum Database Access and Integration
Services (DAIS) working group that is writing specifications for this
important Grid area. EPCC are the primary implementers of a reference
implementation, OGSA-DAI, work funded by the UK e-Science Grid Core Programme.
Founded in 1990, and with more than 60 staff, EPCC has a long history of
working with industry and public bodies in collaborative projects at the
leading edge of computational research and development.
"The Globus Alliance is an excellent development, allowing us to build on
Edinburgh’s existing collaboration with the Globus team," said Professor
Atkinson, director of the National e-Science Centre and chief architect of the
OGSA-DAI Project. "The Alliance’s combined skills will significantly enhance
our capacity to design, develop and deploy this vital distributed system
infrastructure. We are happy to share responsibility for future progress of
the Globus Toolkit."
Founded in 1989, PDC is the main centre for high-performance computing and
visualization for the Swedish academic community. It has a record of
successful early adoption of new technology for high-end users and extensive
experience in developing and deploying security solutions and system
administration tools in open environments, and a record of successful
contributions to the Open Source community. It co-founded the European Grid
Support Centre and the Nordic Grid Consortium, and is an active body in the
European Grid research community.
"The Globus Alliance builds on the world wide success of the Globus project
and provides improved opportunities for regional and local influence on
requirements and solutions for common Grid software components," said Lennart
Johnsson, director of PDC and professor of numerical analysis and computer
science at the Royal Institute of Technology. "We are convinced that the
Globus Alliance effort will improve the development of the Globus Toolkit, and
allow for richer feature sets."
U.S. partners in the Globus Alliance continue to be funded by federal
sponsors
such as the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA and
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Industry sponsors include IBM
and Microsoft Research.
"The interest and use of Grids has grown dramatically over the past two
years"
said Carl Kesselman, director of the Center for Grid Technology at ISI. "The
time is right to expand the partnership to embrace new expertise and to
advance Globus as a responsive, high-quality open source community for Grid
infrastructure."
The new Globus Academic Affiliates program recognizes major contributions
to
the Globus Toolkit by other organizations, as contributors or users. The first
affiliates are, in Europe, CERN, the lead partner of the EU DataGrid project,
and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center; in Asia Pacific, Monash
University in Australia, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology’s Grid Technology and
Research Center in Japan; and in the U.S., the University of Wisconsin’s
Condor group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the
University of Texas Advanced Computing Center, Indiana University and the
University of California-Santa Barbara.
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