GridFrastructure, an early-stage start-up based in Cambridge, Mass., has
announced the release of GF-Tools 1.0 for Linux, which the company calls
“the most comprehensive professionally packaged collection of Grid
computing tools available.”
GF-Tools is a collection of public license and other generally available
software that includes Globus, Condor, and other leading Grid computing
packages, the company said.
GF-Tools includes more than 40 “fully developed and tested packages
providing a full suite of Grid tools, including core Grid services,
schedulers, performance monitoring tools, and programming environments,”
GridFrastructure said. The release of GF-Tools was announced last week
at the Commercial High Performance Computing Conference in Orlando,
Fla.
GridFrastructure Marketing Director Jim Newman said GF-Tools “is
primarily a collection of all of the open source and openly available
tools out there, packaged up in a manageable form, with documentation
links and installation scripts all together.”
“GF-Tools is really a way
for technically minded folks to begin to understand Grid computing and
to play around with the tools,” Newman said. “We put it together as a service to the
HPC community, because there was no comprehensive collection out there,
and we found that quite confusing. GF-Tools makes the Grid computing
landscape much clearer.”
The CD is available for a “nominal packaging fee.” Some of the included
packages are open sourced, so GridFrastructure can’t charge for them,
Newman said.
Grid Services Platform
“The CD is not so much for companies to set up their own Grids as it is
for them to gain understanding of the tools,” Newman said. “The CD is
nicely packaged and the labeling and documentation is quite useful in
understanding how all of the various tools fit together.”
The components of GF-Tools are also the foundation for GF-Grid,
GridFrastructure’s flagship Grid Services Platform. GF-Grid is a
Web-based platform that integrates with Grid middleware solutions to
provide “a highly manageable and trusted environment for running
high-performance computing applications,” the company said. Newman said
the CD components are “the first steps to providing the platform.”
“Just as Linux has become the fastest growing operating system in the
world, we believe that these GF-Tools components, largely developed as
open resources by the Grid community, will become the foundation of the
global Grid,” GridFrastructure President Dan Feldman said in a
statement. “We are making GF-Tools available to the high performance
computing community as part of our mission to advance Grid
deployment.”
Among his 28 years of experience building large-scale computer systems, Feldman served as director of software engineering at Expressway Technologies, where he planned and oversaw the development of parallel execution for the company’s data analysis
product, which later became SybaseIQ. At Sybase, Feldman was a senior manager in the high
performance data analysis group. Most recently, he was in charge of product development at Open Ratings and a co-founder of Avicenna Systems, both applications of high performance or parallel computing available as Web services.
The GF-Tools distribution, release 1.0 for Linux is available directly
from GridFrastructure at info@gridfrastructure.com.
GridFrastructure delivers solutions to the health science, physical
science, engineering and finance industries, and bills itself as a
“technology neutral services provider.”
