Winter seems reluctant to let those of us here in Chicago go of her icy grip. As I was hunkered down here I thought it would be a good time to get back to our roots and investigate what has been going on in various areas and aspects of the Globus Toolkit that I've been meaning to circle back with.

In September of 2006 we featured the Globus Incubator Projects. Given the dynamic nature of these projects I felt we should tie up some of the loose ends we had with our discussions of Globus Security and GridShib, and the Globus Metrics Project.

I was also thrilled to get some time from Kate Keahey for a brief update on the Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing workshop at SC06. Recall that I was very excited about this workshop when I first heard of the call for papers back in July, 2006.

One of the most critical components of the Globus Toolkit is GRAM, the Grid Resource Allocation and Management service. The wait for the new Web Services based GRAM implementation is over, and the results indicate that it was well worth the wait.

In Globus enterprise news, Univa has released the source code of their DDM product to the Open Source Globus community. While Univa has, since it's inception, rallied support around the open source Globus community, this open source release of Univa DDM marks the first large-scale contribution by Univa as a true contributing enterprise partner to the Globus community.

Finally, anyone interested in joining the Globus team should be aware of the currently open developer positions.

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