Globus toolkit version 4: Software for service-oriented systems

Abstract

The Globus Toolkit (GT) has been developed since the late 1990s to support the development of service-oriented distributed computing applications and infrastructures. Core GT components address, within a common framework, basic issues relating to security, resource access, resource management, data movement, resource discovery, and so forth. These components enable a broader "Globus ecosystem" of tools and components that build on, or interoperate with, core GT functionality to provide a wide range of useful application-level functions, These tools have in turn been used to develop a wide range of both "Grid" infrastructures and distributed applications. I summarize here the principal characteristics of the latest release, the Web services-based GT4, which provides significant improvements over previous releases in terms of robustness, performance, usability, documentation, standards compliance, and functionality. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.