Globus Project News Digest
Issue #1, November 12, 2002
The following news about Grid computing is from the Globus Project, a partnership of Argonne National Laboratory,
the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, and the University of Chicago.
Visit the Globus Project web at http://www-unix.globus.org.
For information, please email info@globus.org.
1. Around the Globus Project
GLOBUS WORLD IN JANUARY 2003 WILL GIVE USERS A VIEW "UNDER THE HOOD" OF GRID COMPUTING. The inaugural Globus World will be held January 13-17 in San Diego. Invited talks, interactive panels, and roundtables will cover three tracks: Enterprise Planning for Grids, Architecting Grids with Globus Toolkit TM, and Developing and Administering Globus Toolkit. The event will offer insights for Grid users and developers, along with strategic perspectives for executive decision-makers. Keynote speakers will include Peter Freeman, assistant director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. See http://www.globusworld.org for details, including a Call for Posters (abstracts due on December 6).
GLOBUS PROJECT DEFINES SECURITY RESPONSE PROCEDURE. We’ve instituted a new security vulnerabilities procedure designed to quickly notify our user community of any such issues affecting software from the Globus Project TM. Notifications will go to the new security-announce@globus.org mail list, and anyone subscribed to announce@globus.org , security@globus.org , or discuss@globus.org will receive the same security notices. See full details of the procedure at http://www.globus.org/toolkit/support/security-responses.html.
1. Recent Honors and Media Coverage
FOSTER AND KESSELMAN TO RECEIVE LOVELACE MEDAL. The British Computer Society (BCS) will present its 2002 Lovelace Medal to Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, leaders of the Globus Project. Foster and Kesselman will be honored for “their work with the Globus Project and Grid computing,” according to a citation from the BCS, which gives the award to individuals for contributions with major significance in the advancement or development of information systems. Previous recipients include Doug Engelbart, developer of the computer mouse and graphic interface; and Linus Torvalds, developer of the Linux operating system. See http://www.usc.edu/isinews/stories/67.html.
TUECKE IS AMONG CHICAGO’S TOP “40 UNDER 40.” Crain’s Chicago Business named Globus Project lead architect Steve Tuecke to its list of the “brightest stars” under age 40 in the Chicago area. Other awardees include CEO’s, a federal judge, a bank president, a soprano with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, a soccer star and many entrepreneurs. “A quiet revolution is brewing in the computer world,” says the Crain’s article (http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?mpid=35&page_id=1262). “What Steven J. Tuecke and others are doing at Argonne National Laboratory is akin to the mid-1990s creation of the browser software that made the Internet accessible to the masses.” Earlier in 2002, Tuecke was among MIT’s TR100, the top innovators nationally under age 35 (http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/tr100_0602.asp).
GLOBUS TOOLKIT NAMED “MOST PROMISING NEW TECHNOLOGY.” The Globus Toolkit 2.0 won an "Editors' Choice" award for "Most Promising New Technology" at the R&D 100 Awards ceremony on October 16 at Navy Pier in Chicago. The software toolkit was being honored, along with other R&D 100 recipients, as one of 2002's most significant technological innovations. See http://www.rdmag.com/features/0209dma_hpc23.asp.
THE GLOBUS PROJECT IS COVERED BY NEWSWEEK, THE NEW YORK TIMES, INFOWORLD AND MORE. Newsweek had an extended feature (http://www.msnbc.com/news/804126.asp) about the future of Grid computing, in which one industry leader says, "The 19th century was about the steam engine, and the 20th century was about the combustion engine. I believe that the 21st century will be about the grid engine." The New York Times analyzed IBM’s commitment to Grid computing at http://www.grids-center.org/. According to InfoWeek (http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ap/xml/02/11/11/021111aporacleapps.xml), Oracle Corporation’s new Grid engine builds on the Globus Toolkit. For a thorough list of news links, go to http://www-unix.globus.org/r3/alliance/news/.
2. Feature Story
SCIDAC NATIONAL FUSION COLLABORATORY PROJECT SEES GAINS WITH GLOBUS TOOLKIT
Magnetic fusion energy research is getting a boost from deployment of the Globus Toolkit TM. Project leaders hope the popular toolkit’s Grid software and services will let them collaborate better -- and in different ways -- with partners across the U.S. and overseas.
The National Fusion Collaboratory is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SciDAC program to create and deploy collaborative software tools for magnetic fusion research. The FusionGrid project seeks to promote more efficient use of experimental facilities and more effective integration of experiment, theory, and modeling.
David Schissel is a FusionGrid principal investigator from General Atomics, where he manages the Data Analysis Applications group, part of the Theory and Advanced Computing division. “We asked ourselves, ‘How can a distributed community like ours make collaboration more fruitful?’”, said Schissel. Through contact with Rick Stevens, he became aware of new types of tools being created in the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) division, which Stevens directs.
MCS is home to the Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL) -- a lead partner in the Globus Project -- and the Futures Laboratory (FL), which develops advanced visualization technologies that are also proving useful to fusion researchers. The discussions with ANL led to a successful proposal for three years of SciDAC funding that began in late 2001. The Globus Project's Ian Foster and Kate Keahey are on the FusionGrid team for the DSL, as are Stevens and Mike Papka for the FL, along with others from MIT, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Princeton University, and the University of Utah.
“Our users are geographically distributed across the country,” he said, “but experimental data are centralized at those three sites. To begin, we’re using the Globus Toolkit for remote computation -- including secure data access -- but our eventual goal is to be able to perform the majority of experimental data analysis remotely.” Each plasma exists for only about 10 seconds, with 15 to 20 minutes between plasmas, which presents a very intense data-analysis period. Grid computing can deliver more-detailed and immediate feedback about the plasma behavior, letting fusion scientists make adjustments on the fly, yielding much more-productive experiments.
“What if you did a day of 30 plasmas but couldn't analyze resulting data until the following week?”, said Schissel. “That’s not an efficient use of experimental time. The Grid way has the potential to be a much better use of time in terms of equipment and people.”
Using the Globus Toolkit combined with visualization tools from the Futures Lab and other project members, fusion scientists at their home institutions can retrieve and analyze remote data during experiments in progress, then give tokamak operators feedback in time to shape the next plasma run.
The 44th Annual meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics during the week before SC02 brings together over 1,000 fusion energy scientists. The meeting will feature two invited presentations of results from FusionGrid’s remote computing capability and remote visualization tools, which will also be demonstrated there.
“We're excited that, within one year of start-up, FusionGrid is producing results useful to the fusion community," said Kate Keahey of Argonne National Laboratory, a Globus Project member of the FusionGrid team. "Not every site can afford its own cluster or the manpower to maintain one, so the good news is that if you have Grids, you don't have to.”
MDSPlus (www.mdsplus.org
FusionGrid principals hope to bring experimentalists and theorists closer together by using the Grid-enabled MDSPlus as a common platform for organized data storage, something the theoretical community has lacked previously.
"If I'm working at Princeton and have a computer code there, before I would have brought the code home and it would then have to be maintained at two sites. With Grids, we can share code across 20 to 30 sites,” said Schissel. “I might not have access to a large Beowulf cluster at my home institution. With the Globus Toolkit’s authentication and authorization services, we’re making progress.
Another program, TRANSP from Princeton, has been used since the mid 1980s for data analysis and simulation. TRANSP runs on Linux clusters, and a Globus Toolkit-enhanced version is now being demonstrated at scientific meetings and is producing scientific results that have been presented at the 19th International Atomic Energy Agency Fusion Energy Conference, in addition to the national plasma physics meeting demos and presentations, according to Schissel. Now they’re working on NIMROD, a tool that generates 3D macroscopic models of fusion plasmas.
“Our funders ask us to identify positive results that FusionGrid research is having for scientists,” he said. “The Grid versions of TRANSP and MDSPlus are good examples. So far the overhead is a bit high, though, because the ratio of programmers to scientists is too high. We anticipate that -- as Grid technology matures and fusion scientists gain experience with it -- in time, this ratio will decrease and the entire field will see great benefits.”
Schissel will describe FusionGrid during presentations at the upcoming SC02 conference in Baltimore, November 16-22. He will appear at booths hosted by SciDAC, ANL, the University of Utah, and the University of California at Berkeley.
3. More about the Globus Project
The Globus Project is a partnership of the Distributed Systems Laboratory at Argonne National Laboratory, the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California, and the University of Chicago. Funding comes from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA. For more information, see http://www-unix.globus.org. To subscribe for updates, send mail to majordomo@globus.org with a message body of “subscribe announce” (without quotes). You will receive a confirmation message with simple instructions on how to authenticate your subscription.