Ian Foster

Univa Globus Cluster Edition

We've been increasingly concerned within the Globus community on creating end-user "solutions" as well as the enabling technologies that make such solutions possible. Thus I've been excited by the UCLA Campus Grid Portal and the Swift efforts, for example. Another new effort, Univa Globus Cluster Edition, looks like a significant step forward in terms of level of integration. Combining Grid Engine, Ganglia, Rocks, the Globus Toolkit, and other components, it provides a complete open source cluster management and job scheduling solution. It will be interesting to see who picks up on this.

Globus at OGF 20, May 7-11

May 7-11 is the Open Grid Forum meeting in Manchester (OGF 20). I can't be there myself, as I was already in Europe this week (speaking at the very nice 1st German eScience Conference--more about that later). However, many colleagues from around the world will be there.

In particular, the Globus team will be participating in a broad set of session. There'll be a session in the Software Forum track on Tuesday, 2pm, which will include a discussion of what's new in the core software, and more in depth information about GridWay, the latest Globus project, and OGSA-DAI's upcoming 3.0 release. There will also be some "meet the developer" times in the Exhibit Hall, so you can chat with Globus developers informally. Additional information on Globus at OGF is available online. Or, you can contact Jennifer Schopf.

Forest Observation via GT4

It seems that every day I learn about a neat new GT4-based cyberinfrastructure project that I had previously not heard of. This week, Bill St Arnaud writes about the SAFORAH forest observation system:

The Canadian SAFORAH has many objectives - of which one is to measure the 
amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by Canadian forests. This cyber-infrastructure 
project also supports studies in bird habitat across Canada. It uses 
Globus Toolkit v.4 at all of the SAFORAH participating sites. Currently, 
four Canadian Forestry Centres located in Victoria British Columbia, 
Cornerbrook Newfoundland, Edmonton, Alberta and Laurentian Québec are 
operationally connected to the SAFORAH data grid.  SAFORAH offers 
Grid-enabled OGC services which are used to increase interoperability of 
EO data between SAFORAH and other geospatial information systems. The 
Grid-enabled OGC services consist of the following main components: 
Grid-enabled Web Map Service (GWMS), Grid-enabled Web Coverage Service 
(GWCS), Grid-enabled Catalog Service for Web (GCSW), Grid-enabled Catalog 
Service Federation (GCSF), Control Grid Service (CGS) and the Standard 
Grid Service Interfaces and OGC Standard User Interfaces.

I want to learn more!