A Globus Primer Or, Everything You Wanted to Know about Globus, but Were Afraid To Ask Describing Globus Toolkit Version 4 An Early and Incomplete Draft Please send comments, criticisms, and suggestions to:
[email protected] Preface The Globus Toolkit (GT) has been developed since the late 1990s to support the development of service-oriented distributed computing applications and infrastructures. Core GT components address basic issues relating to security, resource access and management, data movement and management, resource discovery, and so forth. A broader “Globus universe” comprises numerous tools and components that build on core GT4 functionality to provide many useful application- level functions. These tools have been used to develop many Grid systems and applications. Version 4 of the Globus Toolkit, GT4, released in April 2005, represents a significant advance relative to the GT3 implementation of Web services functionality in terms of the range of components provided, functionality, standards conformance, usability, and quality of documentation. This document is intended to provide a first introduction to key features of both GT4 and associated tools, and the ways in which these components can be used to develop Grid infrastructures and applications. Its focus is on the user’s view of the technology and its application, and the practical techniques that should be employed to develop GT4-based applications. We discuss in turn the applications that motivate the development of GT4 and related tools; the four tasks involved in building Grids: design, deployment, application, operations; GT4 structure, including its Web services (WS) and pre-WS components; the Globus universe and its various components; GT4 performance, scalability, and functionality testing; porting to GT4 from earlier versions of GT; who’s using GT4; likely future directions, and a few words of history.