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Globus Toolkit Version 4: Software for Service-Oriented Systems

  • Grid & Services Computing
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Abstract

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, within a common framework, fundamental issues relating to security, resource access, resource management, data movement, resource discovery, and so forth. These components enable a broader “Globus ecosystem” of tools and components that build on, or interoperate with, GT functionality to provide a wide range of useful application-level functions. These tools have in turn been used to develop a wide range of both “Grid” infrastructures and distributed applications. I summarize here the principal characteristics of the recent Web Services-based GT4 release, which provides significant improvements over previous releases in terms of robustness, performance, usability, documentation, standards compliance, and functionality. I also introduce the new “dev.globus” community development process, which allows a larger community to contribute to the development of Globus software.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computation Institute, Argonne National Laboratory & University of Chicago, Argonne, IL, 60439, U.S.A.

    Ian Foster

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  1. Ian Foster
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Correspondence to Ian Foster.

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Ian Foster received a B.S. (Hons I) degree in computer science from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Imperial College, London. Foster is a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, Arthur Holly Compton distinguished service professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, and director of the Computation Institute at the University and Argonne. Foster’s research interests are in distributed and parallel computing and computational science. He has published six books and over 300 articles and technical reports on these and related topics. Foster is also chair of the Globus Management Committee that leads the Globus community, and is Chief Open Source Strategist at Univa Corporation, a company he co-founded to foster and promote commercial applications of Grid technology. Dr. Foster is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the British Computer Society. His awards include the British Computer Society’s award for technical innovation, the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Next Generation award, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal, R&D Magazine’s Innovator of the Year, and DSc Honoris Causa from the University of Canterbury.

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Foster, I. Globus Toolkit Version 4: Software for Service-Oriented Systems. J Comput Sci Technol 21, 513–520 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-006-0513-y

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