Project profile: Initiative for Globus in Europe
Promoting Globus in Europe and Europe in Globus
On 20 January, the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE) became the first technology provider to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with EGI. Over the next years IGE will contribute new technology components to meet the needs of EGI’s users, but what is the Initiative all about?
“Our overarching goal is to help the scientists in the European Research Area,” says Helmut Heller, project director of IGE. “We want to do this through coordination of the widespread European Globus development and operation activities.”
Globus is a middleware toolkit that allows users to build their own grid, “the same way you use a toolkit with hammer, saw or an axe to build a house,” Heller explains. The advantage of this approach is that users can pick and choose which components to deploy. “You don't always have to use the full toolkit: If you know already that you will only do some basic woodworking – building a data grid for example – the saw may be enough.”
“Probably the most successful component of Globus is GridFTP,” says Heller. This component replaces passwords by certificates, improves high-performance data transfer and is used in other grid middleware, such as gLite and ARC.
The 30-month project was set up in October 2010 to support, develop and promote the Globus toolkit in Europe and to strengthen the influence of European developers within the Globus alliance. It all started with what Heller describes as a true ‘grassroots movement’.
“Before we started we did an informal poll which asked the NGIs and other contact points in European countries if they were using Globus or wanted to do so in the near future,” he says. The response was overwhelmingly positive and Heller concluded that, perhaps against popular belief, “Globus already has a geographically diverse user base in Europe.”
European infrastructure providers such as DEISA and PRACE deploy Globus components in their infrastructures namely Gsissh, which allows interactive access to a remote computers using certificates instead of username or passwords, or GridFTP. “However, many of these Globus users did not know about each other or what the European Globus developers were working on,” Heller says. “There was a severe lack of communication and communication channels.”
IGE will add a European perspective to Globus: “We will gather and bundle the European requirements and voice them with the core developers in the USA,” says Heller. At the same time, IGE will deliver tailored software, training, support and documentation to European research communities.
Another key aim of the project is to increase Globus’s visibility in Europe by organising yearly Globus conferences and Globus-themed tracks and workshops in European conferences and EGI’s Technical Forums.
The IGE project is barely six months old but Heller is ready to point out the first success. IGE helped a group of users in DEISA to upgrade the Globus tool that submits jobs to the IBM LoadLeveler scheduler from version 4 to version 5, dubbed GT5.
“This enabled the researchers in the Virtual Physiological Human group [VPH] to use supercomputing facilities at the SARA computing centre in the Netherlands where the new GT5 middleware had already been installed,” says Heller. VPH can now use computing resources from all over Europe and several sites in the USA – and connecting scientists to computing resources is what we’re all here for.
Steven Newhouse (left) and Helmut Heller shake hands after signing the EGI-IGE agreement.
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