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The Globus Consortium is the world's leading organization championing open source Grid technologies in the enterprise. With the support of industry leaders IBM, Intel, and HP, the Globus Consortium draws together the vast resources of IT industry vendors, enterprise IT groups, and a vital open source developer community to advance use of the Globus Toolkit in the enterprise. The Globus Toolkit is the de facto standard for Grid infrastructure enabling IT managers to view all of their distributed computing resources around the world as a unified virtual datacenter. By giving enterprises access to computing resources as they need it, IT costs can go up and down as business demands. An open Grid infrastructure is the pre-requisite to fulfilling the promise of utility computing.
According to Insight Research Corporation, a technology market research firm based in New Jersey, the market for Grid will grow from $250 million in 2003 to $4.9 billion in 2008. At the center of this growth is the Globus Toolkit, a freely available open source package of Grid infrastructure software. Since work on the toolkit first began in 1996, almost all of the world's major server manufacturers and many enterprise software vendors have embraced the Globus Toolkit and integrated it into their Grid market strategies. Some of these companies include: Avaki, DataSynapse, Entropia, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, NEC, Oracle, Platform, and Sun Microsystems. Other leading companies have announced their support for the Globus Toolkit as an open standard for Grid computing, including Cray, Microsoft, and United Devices.
The Globus Toolkit is the world's most popular set of software components for developing Grid applications and programming tools. Today, the Globus Toolkit allows dozens of research centers around the world to dynamically move computing resources around a giant virtual research datacenter. As the Globus Toolkit moves into the enterprise, IT managers will be able to dynamically move IT resources between regional and country offices, across business groups, and even leverage dynamic shared IT infrastructures of business partners.
Enterprise IT architects need to view their IT datacenter as truly global. By continually creating and dismantling virtual supercomputers on-the-fly, the IT manager can place a supercomputer on a stock trader's desk to forecast financial futures. Or, the Globus Toolkit can be used to render hundreds of 3D views of underground oil deposits on the desktop computer of energy company executives before they make the big decision to drill.
The Globus Toolkit consists of a group of software components that solve problems encountered by researchers as they began to share computing across the Grid. With the Globus Toolkit, a Grid developer can;
- allocate computing resources across a Grid of hundreds or thousands of servers;
- monitor computing resources on the Grid
- start and stop distributed applications
- establish a Grid security policy
- monitor and detect failures of individual Grid services
Like the Internet, the technology of the Grid was originally developed by research institutions to share resources. Historically, the Globus Toolkit was used widely by three groups of people - Grid builders, application developers, and application framework developers. As the Grid moves from research centers to the enterprise datacenter, IT managers can access and leverage the vast experience, best practices and widespread usage examples of the Globus Toolkit from the research community.
For Example:
- Grid builders are using Globus services to create shared virtual datacenters. By combining computing resources from a number of datacenters, a researcher can create a gargantuan supercomputer for a short period of time, then free the computing resources for other people to use. For example, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) -- the center that originally created Mosaic, the basis for Netscape and Internet Explorer, to browse supercomputing resources -- designed a Virtual Machine Room that creates shared space for a half dozen high performance computing (HPC) datacenters that stretch from Boston to Maui. Many other large-scale virtual datacenters utilize the Globus Toolkit, including NASA's Information Power Grid and the European DataGrid Project.
- Application developers use Globus services to construct innovative Grid-based applications that require so much computing power that the application cannot be built at one center alone. For example, the Max Planck Institute used the Globus Toolkit for a scientific visualization system to create 3D astrophysics models of colliding black holes and neutron stars.
- Application framework developers are using Globus services to build
specialized software frameworks that make it easier to develop applications that can run over the Grid. For example, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois developed CAVERNsoft, a virtual reality (VR) framework that allows researchers to work together in virtual spaces almost as easily as working in the same room. The virtual collaborative spaces enabled by CAVERNsoft require specialized VR applications that are Grid-enabled with the Globus Toolkit.
The Globus Consortium was created to establish a broad base of corporate support for the open source Globus Toolkit. It is comprised of companies that have a vested interest in promoting use of the Globus Toolkit in enterprise through education, communication and evangelization activities.
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Education: The Globus Consortium is committed to the development of Tutorials and training materials to help foster the adoption of the Globus Toolkit and provide a point of entry for new users of the Globus Toolkit. The Globus Consortium may also produce and present training sessions for various components of the Toolkit.
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Communication: The Globus Consortium will engage in Public Relations outreach efforts including the production of a monthly news digest, The Globus Consortium Journal. The Globus Consortium journal will feature articles and interviews from members and non-members regarding components of the Globus Toolkit, Grid implementations, and other information in line with the Consortium's goals promoting Globus Toolkit use and adoption. In addition, the Globus Consortium will produce a blog, the Grid Meter that will feature comments and perspective on news and events within the Globus and Grid communities.
The Globus Consortium will work with the governing bodies that drive the development efforts of the open source Globus Toolkit including the Globus Management Committee and individual Globus Toolkit Project Chairs. The goal of this interaction will be to foster an information exchange between these governing bodies and the Globus Consortium to help better define actual Toolkit adoption metrics and to communicate enterprise member concerns and suggestions back. In addition the Consortium will work with other organizations and standards bodies to help develop a common ground with those organizations and illustrate how the Globus Toolkit can be the basis for that common ground.
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Evangelization: The Globus Consortium will actively seek and promote, through publicity and documentation, Globus Toolkit success stories. These efforts will be undertaken with the goal of illustrating the value of Grid and the Globus Toolkit in enterprise. The Globus Consortium will participate in focused trade shows and other community events to maintain a presence in the Grid community.
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