Globus: a Metacomputing Infrastructure Toolkit

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 metacomputing services, such as parallel programming tools and schedulers. Our long-term goal is to build an Adaptive Wide Area Resource Environment (AWARE), an integrated set of higher-level services that enable applications to adapt to heterogeneous and dynamically changing metacomputing environments. Preliminary versions of Globus components were deployed successfully as part of the I-WAY networking experiment.