Emerging high-performance applications require the ability to exploit diverse, geographically distributed resources. These applications use high-speed networks to integrate supercomputers, large databases, archival storage devices, advanced visualization devices, and/or scientific instruments to form networked virtual supercomputers or metacomputers. While the physical infrastructure to build such systems is becoming widespread, the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of the metacomputing environment poses new challenges for developers of system software, parallel tools, and applications. In this article, we introduce Globus, a system that we are developing to address these challenges. The Globus system is intended to achieve a vertically integrated treatment of application, middleware, and network. A low-level toolkit provides basic mechanisms such as communication, authentication, network information, and data access. These mechanisms are used to construct various higher-level metacomp...

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Grid technologies enable large-scale sharing of resources within formal or informal consortia of individuals and/or institutions: what are sometimes called virtual organizations. In these settings, the discovery, characterization, and monitoring of resources, services, and computations are challenging problems due to the considerable diversity, large numbers, dynamic behavior, and geographical distribution of the entities in which a user might be interested. Consequently, information services are a vital part of any Grid software infrastructure, providing fundamental mechanisms for discovery and monitoring, and hence for planning and adapting application behavior. We present here an information services architecture that addresses performance, security, scalability, and robustness requirements. Our architecture defines simple low-level enquiry and registration protocols that make it easy to incorporate individual entities into various information structures, such as aggregate directories that support a variety of different query languages and discovery strategies. These protocols can also be combined with other Grid protocols to construct additional higher-level services and capabilities such as brokering, monitoring, fault detection, and troubleshooting. Our architecture has been implemented as MDS-2, which forms part of the Globus Grid toolkit and has been widely deployed and applied.

Metacomputing systems are intended to support remote and/or concurrent use of geographically distributed computational resources. Resource management in such systems is complicated by five concerns that do not typically arise in other situations: site autonomy and heterogeneous substrates at the resources, and application requirements for policy extensibility, co-allocation, and online control. We describe a resource management architecture that addresses these concerns. This architecture distributes the resource management problem among distinct local manager, resource broker, and resource co-allocator components and defines an extensible resource specification language to exchange information about requirements. We describe how these techniques have been implemented in the context of the Globus metacomputing toolkit and used to implement a variety of different resource management strategies. We report on our experiences applying our techniques in a large testbed, GUSTO, incorporating 15 sites, 330 computers, and 3600 processors.

In an increasing number of scientific disciplines, large data collections are emerging as important community resources. In this paper, we introduce design principles for a data management architecture called the Data Grid. We describe two basic services that we believe are fundamental to the design of a data grid, namely, storage systems and metadata management. Next, we explain how these services can be used to develop higher-level services for replica management and replica selection. We conclude by describing our initial implementation of data grid functionality.

The Globus project is a multi-institutional research e#ort that seeks to enable the construction of computational grids providing pervasive, dependable, and consistent access to high-performance computational resources, despite geographical distribution of both resources and users. Computational grid technology is being viewed as a critical element of future highperformance computing environments that will enable entirely new classes of computation-oriented applications, much as the World Wide Web fostered the development of new classes of information-oriented applications. In this paper, we report on the status of the Globus project as of early 1998. We describe the progress that has been achieved to date in the development of the Globus toolkit, a set of core services for constructing grid tools and applications. We also discuss on the Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed (GUSTO) that we have constructed to enable largescale evaluation of Globus technologies, and review early exp...

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This paper examines the role of parametric modeling as an application for the global computing grid, and explores some heuristics which make it possible to specify soft real time deadlines for larger computational experiments. We demonstrate the scheme with a case study utilizing the Globus toolkit running on the GUSTO testbed. 1 Introduction Parametric computational experiments are becoming increasingly important in science and engineering as a means of exploring the behavior of complex systems. For example, an engineer may explore the behaviour of a wing by running a computational model of the airfoil multiple times while varying key parameters such as angle of attack, air speed, etc. The results of these multiple experiments yield a picture of how the wing behaves in different parts of parametric space. Over the past several years, we have developed a specialized parametric modeling system called Nimrod [1][2][3][17]. Nimrod uses a simple declarative parametric modeling language ...

Advances in networking technologies will soon make it possible to use the global information infrastructure in a qualitatively different way—as a computational resource as well as an information resource. This idea for an integrated computation and information resource called the Computational Power Grid has been described by the recent book entitled The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure [18]. The Grid will connect the nation’s computers, databases, instruments, and people in a seamless web, supporting emerging computation-rich application concepts such as remote computing, distributed supercomputing, tele-immersion, smart instruments, and data mining. To realize this vision, significant scientific and technical obstacles must be overcome. Principal among these is usability. Because the Grid will be inherently more complex than existing computer systems, programs that execute on the Grid will reflect some of this complexity. Hence, making Grid resources useful and accessible to scientists and engineers will require new software tools that embody major advances in both the theory and practice of building Grid applications. The goal of the Grid Application Development Software (GrADS) Project is to simplify distributed heterogeneous computing in the same way that the World Wide Web simplified information sharing

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