Globus Consortium Launches Grid Development Projects

The Globus Consortium has announced three new development projects for the Globus Toolkit, the de facto standard for grid computing, that the group hopes will speed enterprise adoption of open source grid computing technologies.

The consortium, a non-profit organization backed by HP, IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Nortel and Univa, is aimed at boosting enterprise adoption of open source grid computing technologies, chief among them the new “enterprise ready” Globus Toolkit 4.0.

“The improved robustness and Web services foundation of GT4 will be a springboard for wide scale enterprise adoption of the toolkit,” stated Greg Nawrocki, president of the Globus Consortium. “The Globus Consortium is moving very quickly to bolster enterprise support for the Globus Toolkit development community, which has already made great strides in providing an open platform that we believe will help facilitate grid implementation in corporate data centers.”

The three initiatives, launched less than three months after the formation of the Globus Consortium, focus on priority bug fixing, Web services execution management, and documentation.

Priority bug fixing will further stabilize Globus Toolkit 4.0 for enterprise environments, the group said, so it is funding efforts for bug fixing and enhancements to the toolkit. The group also offers a system that gives consortium members a priority response for bugs they submit. All fixes go back to the open source Globus Toolkit; several fixes and enhancements have already been absorbed into the final GT4 code base. The project is also being utilized to port some critical resource management test suites and code examples from GT3 to GT4.

GT4 has been implemented with a method of execution management based on Web services, so the consortium said it will sponsor the creation of documents that capture the GT4 WS-GRAM interfaces, semantics, and abstractions so that they can be used easily in grid standards discussions. This will include a roadmap that describes how the functionality embodied in GT4 WS-GRAM can be standardized in stages, and how other standards efforts such as WSDM, WS-Agreement, and WS-CIM might be brought to bear on execution management standards at various stages.

To better support international Globus Toolkit developers, the consortium said it is funding globalization efforts, including a survey of Globus Alliance organizations, consortium members, and industry best practices teams to help define the requirements and approaches for Globus software globalization. The group plans a number of internationalization documents based on the survey.

For more information on the consortium, visit www.GlobusConsortium.com.

Back To Grid Computing Planet

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis

News Around the Web