News for and about the Internet2 community

[Greg Wood <>]

News from the Globus Project

GLOBUS TOOLKIT 3.0 DELIVERS GRID STANDARDS
Alpha version of popular open source Grid software points the way to a 
new generation of Grid services and applications

SAN DIEGO, January 13, 2003  Grid computing takes a major step forward
today with the first implementation of emerging standards known as the 
Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).  The Globus Project (TM) issued 
its  alpha release of the Globus Toolkit 3.0 (GT3), a set of open-source
software and services whose earlier versions have transformed the way
on-line resources are shared across organizations.

GT3's release, which coincides with the first GlobusWorld conference 
this week in San Diego (http://www.globusworld.org), is the result of 
the past year's effort toward defining specifications for Grid services 
that extend  standard Web services.  The OGSA-based alpha version builds 
on prior releases of the Globus Toolkit, which is central to hundreds of 
science and engineering projects on the Grid.

The Globus Project also announced that other leading Grid participants 
are committing to use of GT3 and OGSA.  Companies include Avaki, Cray,
Entropia, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, Platform Computing, Silicon
Graphics, Inc.,  Sun Microsystems, and Veridian.  Research projects 
include FusionGrid, TeraGrid, the Department of Energy Science Grid, the 
Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN), the Network for Earthquake Engineering
Simulation, the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory, and the
National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative.  A collection of 
quotes  about GT3 by these partners is at
http://www.globus.org/about/news/prGT3quotes03-01-12.html.

"We're enthused about this latest Globus Toolkit release," said Ian 
Foster, associate division director for mathematics and computer science 
at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and professor of computer science 
at the University of Chicago.  "The Grid's promise of seamlessly sharing 
resources across distributed organizations takes another major step 
towards realization with GT3 and its implementation of the OGSA 
standards.  The array of partners that we have assembled demonstrates 
the power of combining open source and open standards with industrial
investment."

Foster is co-leader of the Globus Project with colleagues
Carl Kesselman (professor of computer science at the University of 
Southern California and director of the USC Information Sciences 
Institute's Center for Grid Technologies) and Steve Tuecke (lead 
architect of the ANL Distributed Systems Laboratory).

GT3 will benefit from an expanding community of developers who are 
closely involved in helping to develop Grid standards through the Global 
Grid Forum (GGF), a community-based organization with public- and 
private-sector contributors. For example, the UK e-Science program is 
leading the GGF's OGSA Database Access and Integration (DAIS) working 
group to build database capabilities into OGSA and GT3.  Lawrence 
Berkeley National Laboratory is also contributing directly to the GT3 
code base.

"GT3 provides a major step forward in the functionality provided by the
Globus Toolkit," said Kesselman.  "However, of equal importance is that 
GT3 builds on OGSA, which in turn builds on Web services.  By leveraging 
widely supported commodity technologies, we can lower the barrier of 
entry to the deployment of Grids and the development of Grid 
technologies.  As a consequence, we expect to see the base of GT3 
deployment to extend into new and important user communities."

The GT3 beta release will be in Spring 2003, with official release in
Summer 2003, Tuecke emphasized.  "The term 'alpha' means code that works 
to the best of its developers' knowledge, but is not final or bug-free," 
he said. "Support for the alpha release will be on a best-effort basis,
because the Globus Project development team will be focused largely on
improving the implementation for future releases."

Development of GT3 is sponsored primarily by the U.S. Department of 
Energy through its Office of Science's Mathematical, Information and 
Computational Sciences Division, as well as by industry partners IBM and 
Microsoft Research.

"Grid technologies are essential to the scientific mission of the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE)," said Ed Oliver, Associate Director for the 
DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Research Office (ASCR).  "ASCR has 
long supported this type of fundamental R&D both to further the study of
computer science, and to add important new capabilities to 
energy-related research. We are also gratified by the Grid's broad 
impact in commercial computing, which is a secondary but important benefit."

About the Globus Project
The Globus Project conducts research and development to create the
fundamental technologies behind the "Grid," which lets people share
computing power, databases, and other tools securely online across
corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing
local autonomy. The project's open source Globus Toolkit (TM) includes 
software services and libraries for resource monitoring, discovery, and 
management, plus security and file management.  The toolkit is central 
to science and engineering projects that total nearly a half-billion 
dollars internationally, and it is the substrate on which leading IT 
companies are building significant commercial Grid products. The Globus 
Toolkit 2.0 received a 2002 R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine, which 
further honored the toolkit as 2002's "Most Promising New Technology." 
The Globus Project is based at Argonne National Laboratory and the 
University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. For 
more information, see http://www.globus.org.

--END--

For more information, see the http://www.globus.org/toolkit/.
Media queries:  Tom Garritano, 

 and 630-667-4434.

---------------------------------------------------------------i2-news-+
For list utilities, archives, subscribe, unsubscribe, etc. please visit the
ListProc web interface at 

   http://archives.internet2.edu/

---------------------------------------------------------------i2-news--