Ian Foster

New release of Globus Eclipse code

Kay Dörnemann writes about a new release of the Grid Development Tools for Eclipse (GDTE), a bundle of Eclipse Plugins for Service and Application Development in the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment for the Globus Toolkit 4:

I have the pleasure to announce the release of GDTE 1.2.0. The release can be easily installed using the Eclipse update mechanism: see our Update site.

Installation instructions, tutorials, and documentation can be found at the GDTE dev.globus incubator site.

Tutorials are available online and if you install the GDT feature, there's also Help available in your Eclipse workbench, describing more details about the use of the GDT. (We also support using Eclipse headless, i.e. running the GDT tools as commandline tools, offering the possibility to include them in automated build scripts.)

Whats new: We added service-side security descriptor creation through a wizard. Added Singleton Resource support and load on Startup support. Reworked the wizard pages and fixed several bugs. For more information please read the changelogs.

GT 4.0.5 Released

I enclose below the text that Charles Bacon sent today to announce@globus.org.

There are a LOT of improvements in GT4.0.5. A few highlights: GRAM staging performance is doubled, thanks to optimized local invocations; GridWay metascheduler is included; lots of new trigger service functionality.

Medieval Tech Support

This video is dangerously funny. Thanks to Savas for this pointer--although I found an extended version that also includes the particularly humorous ending concerning the user manual. Perhaps some sensitivity in Redmond on that point? :-)

Weka4WS 1.0 Release -- Data Mining

Domenico Talia tells me about his groups release of Weka4WS version 1.0. Weka4WS is a Web Services-based framework for  distributed data mining. It's based on the popular Weka Explorer data mining system from the University of Waikato in New Zealand, and is based on Globus Toolkit 4.

I'd love to hear from people who are using this software.

Digital Rome

I like this story (and see images and video)--June 11, 2007 -- ROME -- Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni will officiate at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project based at the University of Virginia and begun at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to use advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome. The event will take place at 2 p.m. in the Palazzo Senatorio on the Campidoglio.  An international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany employed the same high-tech tools used for simulating contemporary cities such as laser scanners and virtual reality to build the biggest, most complete simulation of an historic city ever created. “Rome Reborn 1.0" shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.

OpenDocument Challenge to Microsoft Open Specification Promise

Our decision in the 1990s to release Globus software as open source has resulted in me learning far more than I ever thought I'd need to know about the law. I suspect that not all readers know as much as they should about the licensing issues involved in both open standards and open source software. That is unfortunate, because there are subtleties that can result in confusion, uncertainty, and even liability. In this regard, I found a recent posting by the OpenDocument Foundation of interest. It certainly convinced me that I don't understand as much as I thought I did about these issues. I'm glad that we've adopted the standard Apache v2 license for Globus software.

The OpenDocument Foundation posting follows:

Nature Asia-Pacific Conference

I spoke at a conference in Tokyo this week, that Nature Publishing Group organized to celebrate 20 years of publishing in Asia-Pacific. I should have been in Madison for the TeraGrid '07 meeting, but I agreed long ago to speak here. It was a fun event, with participants from all across Asia. Lots of "real scientists" as I affectionately call my non-computer scientist colleagues. Indeed, the other keynote speaker was Ryoji Noyori from RIKEN, the 2001 Chemistry Nobel. A particularly large number of people praised my talk, so either (a) Asian people are very polite, or (b) it was a good talk. I estimate 80% (a) and 20% (b).

One topic that was discussed during the meeting was the relative "invisibility" of many Asian institutions and researchers, simply because they do not have good English Web sites. An example of how simple things can make a big difference.

I couldn't stay to visit any of my friends in Japan because I have to head straight back to Chicago to dress up in a funny robe and present an honorary degree to Scott Shenker. More about that later.

IBERGRID Video Online

The organizers of IBERGRID kindly posted this video of my talk on "Scaling eScience Impact" (the slides are here). The abstract follows:

Computational approaches to problem solving have proven their worth in many fields of science, allowing the collection and analysis of unprecedented quantities of data, and the exploration via simulation of previously obscure phenomena. We now face the challenge of scaling the impact of these approaches from the specialist to entire communities.  I speak here about work that seeks to address this goal by rethinking science's information technology foundations in terms of service-oriented architecture.  In principle, service-oriented approaches can have a transformative effect on scientific communities, allowing tools formerly accessible only to the specialist to be made available to all, and permitting previously manual data-processing and analysis tasks to be automated. However, while the potential of such "service-oriented science" has been demonstrated, its routine application across many disciplines raises challenging technical problems. One important requirement is to achieve a separation of concerns between discipline-specific content and domain-independent infrastructure; another is to streamline the formation and evolution of the "virtual organizations" that create and access content. I describe the architectural principles, software, and deployments that I am and my colleagues have produced as we tackle the first of these problems, and point to future technical challenges and scientific opportunities.

In addition to covering issues discussed in my 2005 Science paper, I touched upon recent work by the OSU team and Ravi Madduri on Introduce and RAVE, and by the U.Chicago team on Swift and Falkon.

Release of Globus Toolkit 4.1.2

The wonderful GT development team just announced the latest development release. The 4.1.2 release contains early looks at new features destined for GT 4.2, and as such is not recommended for production environments--but is highly recommended for people who want to try new features, of which there are many. Highlights include:

• Persistent HTTP/S connection support in Java WS Core
• Dynamic deployment support in Java WS Core
• JBOSS 4.0.x support in Java WS Core
• An implementation of WS-ServiceGroup added to C WS Core
• C command-line tools for WSRF operations
• Support for GetResourceProperties and QueryResourceProperties in the Delegation Service
• Added support for the OGSA-AuthZ Authorization Service to CAS
• Server-side attribute-based authorization framework enhancements
• Support for a pluggable Policy Decision Point (PDP) designed to minimize common authorization errors
• Enhanced security descriptor framework
• A Web service interface for the Replica Location Service (RLS)
• Improved data service resource support in OGSA-DAI
• Improved support for multiple TriggerRules in the Trigger Service
• Improved configuration interface for the Trigger Service
• Java API to assist in creating resource properties from external information sources
• A new resource manager (RM) adapter API in GRAM4