Consortium seeks to make grids more enterprise network ready

A consortium led by HP, IBM and others to promote commercial adoption of an open source-based grid computing tool kit says a new version of the software will make it easier for companies to roll out distributed computing environments.

Grid computing has been moving beyond its academic and scientific roots as enterprise network operators recognize that distributing workloads can result in better hardware utilization. But in many cases issues such as lack of standards, questions about security and complexity have held up deployments.

The Globus Consortium says the revised Globus Toolkit, which incorporates more Web services standards and new security and authorization features, is designed to address such issues. It can be downloaded at www.globustoolkit.org.

The Globus Alliance, which owns the tool kit and leads development work around it, began the move to bring Web services standards into the framework with the GT3 release about 18 months ago.

"But GT3 was far from enterprise-ready. It was a first, a prototype of how one might apply Web services," says Ian Foster, a board member of the Globus Alliance and associate director of the mathematics and computer science division of Argonne National Laboratory, where the alliance is partly based.

Among the Web service standards available in GT4 are Web Services Interoperability, to ensure that heterogeneous environments work together; Web Services Security, including Security Markup Language and Extensible Access Control Markup Language; and Web Services Reliability and Web Services Resource Framework specifications to enable grid resources to be managed and shared in a Web services environment.

"In the past, things were very proprietary. Everybody invented his own specific, low-level implementation so that resources could talk to each other," says Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of grid and networking services at MCNC, a private nonprofit established to foster technology-led economic development and job creation throughout North Carolina. "Now it's standardized."

MCNC, in Research Triangle Park, N.C., conducted test bed work with GT4 and found it to be more solid and easier to implement than previous versions. "GT2 took a couple of months to install and have up and running. It took us two days to get GT4 up," he says. "There's a real nice improvement in user-friendliness."

In addition, with the tool kit being based on widely accepted and tested Web services standards, customers are not trapped into proprietary offerings. Globus tool kit-based products are available from major systems vendors such as HP, IBM and Sun.