The Globus Project
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One of the primary goals of the Globus project is to develop the software tools and services necessary to build a computational grid infrastructure and to develop applications that can exploit the advanced capabilities of the grid.

To meet this goal, we are developing an integrated set of basic grid services, collectively called the Globus toolkit. The Globus approach differs from the other computational grid approaches in three ways:

  1. its "bag of services" model, which allows applications to use grid services without having to adopt a particular programming model;
  2. its provision of specialized mechanisms that may co-exist with, but also sometimes replace, mechanisms provided by commodity computing; and
  3. its support for an information-based approach to meeting application performance requirements.

Using the basic services provided by the toolkit, researchers may build a range of higher-level capabilities.   For example, Globus provides a complete implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) that can run across heterogeneous collections of computers.

Here is a summary of the current contents of the Globus toolkit.  More details on each of these components can be obtained by following the links.

Resource Management The Globus Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM)  provides a uniform interface to a range of local resource management tools, including LSF, NQE, and LoadLeveler.  An extensible Resource Specification Language (RSL) is used to pass application requirements to the underlying system.
Security Grid security components must provide a means for integrating diverse local security solutions, such as SSH, and Kerberos.  The Globus Security Infrastructure (GSI) uses public key technology and X.09 certificates to provide single sign-on, authenticated resource allocation, and process-to-process authentication
Information Infrastructure Information about the state of components of a computational grid is essential to building high-performance applications.  The Metacomputing Directory Service (MDS) provides a distributed network-enabled infrastructure for publishing and obtaining information about components of the grid.
Communication The Nexus communication library provides unicast and multicast message delivery services and is designed to permit efficient implementation over a wide range of underlying communication protocols.
Fault Tolerance The Heartbeat Monitor (HBM) provides the ability to detect the failure of specific machines and processes.  Application-specific fault recovery mechanisms can be built on the facilities provided by the HBM.
Remote Data Access The Globus Access to Secondary Storage (GASS) allows an application to specify a remote file by specifying a URL.  Read, write, and append modes are supported.  GASS provides the basis for Globus Executable Management as well.


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Last modified 06/22/99. Comments? webmaster@globus.org