Industry, Research Leaders Hail Release of Globus Toolkit 3.0

released 01.13.03

Contact

Tom Garritano Argonne National Laboratory garritano@mcs.anl.gov 630-667-4434

SAN DIEGO — To coincide with today’s release of the Globus Toolkit™ 3.0 (GT3)—the first implementation of emerging standards known as the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)—leading figures in the business and public research sectors spoke out in support. Those quotes are collected below.

The Globus Project™ issued its alpha release of GT3, a set of open-source software and services whose earlier versions have transformed the way on-line resources are shared across organizations. The release coincides with the first GlobusWorld conference this week in San Diego. See http://www.globus.org/about/news/prGT3announce03-01-12.html for a press release describing GT3.

QUOTES FROM GLOBUS PROJECT PARTNERS
"The TeraGrid is an ambitious project funded by the National Science Foundation to build a distributed terascale computing and data infrastructure across four sites, connected by the world's fastest network at 40 gigabits per second. The Globus Toolkit 3.0 and new, OGSA standards-based Grid services are an essential, enabling technology for TeraGrid. We look forward to working with the Globus Project in mutually beneficial ways to help advance science and engineering research through Grid computing."
--Rick Stevens
Project Director, TeraGrid; Mathematics and Computer Science Division Director, Argonne National Laboratory

"For the Grid to realize its full potential to dramatically increase the effectiveness of computing in science and engineering, three high-level milestones must be met. First, we must provide basic infrastructure to support resource aggregation and sharing through the formation and management of large-scale virtual organizations, and good progress has been made toward this milestone. Second, the Grid must provide for using and managing these resources through value-added services that are easily integrated with the Web. Third, the Grid must provide technology for promoting Grid resources and services to semantically rich objects, enabling knowledge-based problem-solving environments.

"With the Globus Toolkit 3.0 implementation of OGSA, we have an important set of basic tools to achieve the second major milestone in making Grids indispensable for increasing productivity and effectiveness of science and engineering—that is, a unified and standard approach to integrating Grids and Web Services."
--William E. Johnston
Senior Scientist, DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and NASA Ames Research Center

"NEESgrid is a collaborative research environment designed to serve the needs of the earthquake engineering community. For NEESgrid to be a production resource and to work across platforms, across disciplines, and at sites throughout the U.S., it needs persistent standards and integrated resources that can be easily accessed and used by all. That's why the Globus Toolkit is an important component of our efforts. Using NEESgrid, earthquake engineers can focus on conducting their experiments and developing better approaches to reducing the impact of natural hazards. They benefit from the resource management, security, and software compatibility Globus provides without having to deal with these issues directly. The Globus Toolkit provides a solid foundation for innovation, and I am especially pleased to see the 3.0 release."
--Dan Reed
Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Principal Investigator for NEESgrid

"The Globus Toolkit 3.0 is not only an important element of IBM's Grid strategy, it represents a significant milestone for the computing industry," said Tom Hawk, IBM's general manager of Grid computing. "Over time, I believe we'll look back on 2003 as one of the key acceleration years in Grid because of the introduction of Globus Took Kit 3.0 and its implementation of the emerging Open Grid Services Architecture standard. OGSA and the Globus Toolkit are as important to the development of Grid as TCP/IP was to the development of the Internet."
--Tom Hawk
General Manager of Grid Computing, IBM

"The GriPhyN and IVDGL projects are at the vanguard of science that is based on Grid computing, and therefore we rely heavily on the Globus Toolkit to ease management of and access to remote resources. Important physics instruments like the Large Hadron Collider produce massive datasets that require Grid-enabled distributed systems for real-time sharing of data and related assets. The advent of GT3 and OGSA means these systems can be increasingly customized, due to reliance on new standards that define precisely what Grid services are and can do. This enables the type of computational science that is a model for 21st century research in science and engineering."
--Paul Avery
Principal Investigator, GriPhyN and IVDGL; Professor Physics, the University of Florida

"HP has a long tradition of supporting open source tools, as evidenced by our development of the Linux IA-64 kernel. We support an open standards-based environment for the Grid and expect to contribute to the development of the Globus Toolkit both today and in the future, as the world evolves towards planetary-scale computing."
--Rich Friedrich
Director, Internet Systems and Storage, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

"Web and Grid Service technologies offer great opportunities in Grid computing. The new GT3 building upon these technologies is a major step forward in bringing production-ready Grids to a larger community and a major asset for the future Grid projects which will follow and leverage the results of the EU DataGrid project."
--Fabrizio Gagliardi
Head, EU DataGrid Project

"As a Grid vendor and user, we want to help our customers take advantage of the same benefits we've reaped from grid computing. Oracle today has key technology differentiators that make us unique. Using commodity clusters on Linux, customers can benefit from mainframe computing at half the cost and achieve higher utilization. We've worked with the Globus Project to integrate the Globus Toolkit 2.2 with the Oracle database and look forward to continuing our work with them."
--Benny Souder
Vice President, Distributed Database Development, Oracle Corporation

"The release of GT3 is an important landmark in the integration of Web and Grid Services. In the case of OGSA-DAI, it provides essential building blocks for enabling database interoperability in a Grid environment."
--Dave Pearson
Program Manager, OGSA Database Access and Integration (DAI) Working Group

"Over the past year, we have seen commercial acceptance of Grid computing continue to grow among our clients as enterprises such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, JPMorgan Chase and others realize its compelling business value. As part of our commitment to OGSA, Platform will continue to support Globus GT2 and ensure that future releases of Platform products and solutions are GT3 and OGSA-compliant, including Platform Globus."
--Ian Baird
Chief Business Architect, Platform Computing Inc. and GGF Steering Committee Board Member

"The Globus Toolkit continues to be the key to open, interoperable grids. I am excited to see GT3's release as it represents a major step forward in incorporating Web services technologies with Globus, and provides a convenient way to integrate desktop grids such as Entropia's DCGrid into larger enterprise and cross-enterprise grids."
--Andrew Chien
Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer, Entropia

"We are pleased with the progress of the GT3 and the advancement of OGSA. OGSA holds the potential to provide the grid community with strong basis for the rapid development of grid technologies and products. Our customers will benefit from the interoperability the standard will provide."
--Andrew Grimshaw
Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Avaki

"SGI congratulates the Globus Project on the release of GT3. We believe that it represents a major leap forward in bringing functionality to the Grid. SGI is committed to ongoing support of the Globus Tool Kit 3 and OGSA and will soon begin the process of validating GT3 on its newly released Altix
3000 family of servers and superclusters—the world's scalable machines for LINUX."
--Walter Stewart
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Director of Business Development, SGI Canada
Global Coordinator, SGI Grid Strategy

"The OGSA standard is a breakthrough for the wide acceptance of Grid computing, ranging from Grid users and resource providers to Grid and Web Service developers. OGSA is especially important for our thousands of Sun customers who, during the past two years, have built grids within their enterprise or university campus. Now, with OGSA, it is much easier for them to enhance their grids by integrating Sun Grid Engine and the Grid Engine Portal with additional functionality—like the ones provided by GT3."
--Wolfgang Gentzsch
Director of Grid Computing, Sun Microsystems