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Globus Toolkit® 3.2 Beta Release Notes

The following topics contain high level descriptions of what's new in the following technology areas:

Grid Services Core
Security (GSI)
GridFTP
XIO
Resource Management (GRAM)
Community Authorization Server (CAS)
Information Services (MDS)
Reliable File Transfer (RFT)
Replica Location Service (RLS)
C Bindings
Python Bindings
OGSA-DAI (Tech Preview)
Known Issues

For more information please see resources specified in each of the technology sections.

Grid Services Core

The Globus Toolkit Grid Services Core component released in the 3.2 beta release contains important bug fixes and improvements on existing functionality. Changes include better deactivate semantics, a change in the persistent grid service programming model, changes to the security descriptor format, updated third party jars and more.

Further information can be found in the Core release notes.

Security (GSI)

The Globus Toolkit Security component shipped in 3.2 beta contains a slew of bug fixes and various improvements. Improvements of note are updated third party libraries, Certificate Revocation List (CRL) support in Java, support for pluggable authorization in the GridFTP and GT2 GRAM components, SimpleCA and improved documentation. Also, the security component will no longer ship with the Globus CA certificate. Users requiring certificates for testing should take a look at the Globus Certificate Service or Simple CA.

Further information can be found in the Security release notes.

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GridFTP

The Globus Toolkit wuftpd-based GridFTP server, its associated tools, and libraries in the 3.2 beta release contain important bug fixes and improvements on existing functionality.

Improvements include support for platform independent, machine parseable, file info (MLST and MLSD commands), a new checksum command (cksm), support for the Unix chmod command, and support for file globbing and directory moves, i.e. globus-url-copy is no longer restricted to a single file. globus-url-copy also now has command line options for all the equivalent client library functionality.

Further information can be found in the GridFTP release notes.

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XIO

Globus XIO is an extensible input/output library for the Globus Toolkit®. For this and future releases of the Globus Toolkit the globus_xio library will provide all input and output functionality for the C code.

Globus XIO will replace the globus_io library. A portability layer is included with the release so legacy applications written to globus_io will be supported; however it is recommended that future applications code straight to the globus_xio API.

For more information on the globus_xio see:
http://www-unix.globus.org/developer/xioo

Features:

Simple intuitive open/close/read/write API
Swappable IO implementations
Simple API to many different types of IO

Current driver implementations:

Transport drivers:
- tcp
- udp
- file

Transform drivers:
- gsi
- gssapi_ftp
- ftp_cmd
- http

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GRAM

The Globus Toolkit Grid Services GRAM component in the GT 3.2 beta release contains many important bug fixes and improvements on existing functionality.

Improvements:

For the web service (WS) Managed Job Service (MJS), we improved the following:

Faults are more easily internationalized.
The local scheduler scripts provide better error messages.
Instances are deactivated during periods of inactivity in order to increase scalability by reducing memory consumption.

For the pre-WS JobManager, we applied a patch for bug 802 which enables an alternate method for job status detection for a user (this is used in Condor-G).
For both WS MJS and pre-WS JobManager, the local scheduler scripts
have been improved to reduce the chance of errors due to NFS caching delays and increase scalability by reducing memory consumption.
The WS GRAM components are now IPV6 compliant.
For the managed-job-globusrun program, we added these options:

The -deleg [full | limited] option indicates limited or full proxy delegation.
The -proxy [ <file path>] option selects credentials to use for authentication.

Important bug fixes:

For the WS MJS, we fixed:

UHE GRIM credential lifetime to obey user configuration.
job recovery problems.

For the WS GRAM compontents, we fixed UHE recovery and automatic shutdown (due to inactivity)

Further information can be found in the GRAM release notes.

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CAS

Included in the GT 3.2 beta release is the first production release of the Community Authorization Service (CAS). CAS is an authorization system that allows for fine-grain (e.g. per file) access control of Grid Resources. GT 3.2 beta includes the CAS Grid Service, which allows for creating and administering rights, client tools and libraries for using CAS, and a CAS-enabled GridFTP service. More information on CAS can be found here.

This version of CAS uses the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard. Users should be aware that RSA Security has identified four patents it believes could be relevant to implementing certain operational modes of the SAML specifications. The Globus Alliance has established a license agreement with RSA covering usage of SAML in the Globus Toolkit, however users who redistribute SAML-enabled portions of the Globus Toolkit or use SAML-enabled portions in their own applications should understand the issue and may want to obtain a royalty-free license from RSA.

For information regarding the patent claims and a royalty-free reciprocal license to the patents, see:
http://www.rsasecurity.com/solutions/standards/saml/

For sublicense rights to the RSA patents under the Globus Toolkit Public License, see:
http://www.globus.org/Security/CAS/GT3/rsa-sublicense.html

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Information Services (MDS)

The GT 3.2 Beta release of the Information Services components contains bug fixes, performance and stability improvements, and a few new features. There has also been considerable reworking of Service Data Aggregation concepts into a component-based API to allow for a more flexible model handling multiple data aggregation strategies. As a result of these changes, the Index Service (and other services that incorporate the Aggregator components) can now aggregate service data from other services by using the ServiceGroup registration interfaces.

Further information can be found in the Information Services release notes.

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RFT

The Reliable File Transfer Service component in the GT 3.2 beta release contains bug fixes and extended functionality. In particular, this version of Reliable File Transfer Service supports recursive directory copy between GridFTP servers that support MLSD/MLST features.

The schemas of the service have been reworked which increased the scalability of service significantly.

A new service instance level option has been added that turns on data channel reuse if your request consists of multiple transfers between same hosts which will further enhance performance.

A new command line client has been added, which in addition to being able to submit transfer requests to service, can also serve as notification sink. This allows one to display number of transfers done/failed etc.

More information can be found in the RFT release notes.

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RLS

The Replica Location Service (RLS) component in the GT 3.2 beta release contains bug fixes and extended functionality. In particular, this version of RLS supports the deployment of a hierarchy of Replica Location Index (RLI) nodes.

In past RLS versions, RLIs summarized mapping information from one or more Local Replica Catalog (LRC) nodes. In the new version, an RLS can be configured with an arbitrary hierarchy of RLI nodes, where each RLI summarizes state information for one or more lower-level LRC and/or RLI nodes.

In addition, the following have been fixed:

Memory leak when LRC or RLI is updating RLIs that have been down for extended periods
Args reversed when limiting results when not using MySQL
Typo in SQL that retrieves attribute values
Bug 1495 (typos in the code)
Inconsistencies with pkgdata
RLS hang when started up as RLI only
Java API inconsistency (RLSClient.RLI.rliList has been added)
Packaging metadata

Further information can be found in the RLS release notes.

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C Bindings

The C Bindings component of the Globus Toolkit in 3.2 beta contains bugfixes, as well as added support for big numbers using the xsd:integer type.

Since 3.0.x, a number of important bug fixes have been made,including fixes for gt3_gram_client library for multiple job submission,as well as a number of fixes to memory handling in that library. Also,support for Tru64 native compiler was improved.

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Python Bindings (Contribution from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

This Python Bindings component of the GT 3.2 beta release contains tools for creating client-side bindings for OGSI from WSDL/GWSDL. This release has facilities for secure messaging including security context negotiation, delegation, and GSS XML Signatures (pyGlobus is a security dependency).

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OGSA-DAI (Tech Preview)

Included in the GT 3.2 beta release is a tech preview of the Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) software. OGSA-DAI aims to provide uniform methods for discovering, accessing and integrating heterogeneous data resources, primarily databases, on the Grid. An extensible activity framework allows developers to build project specific functionality in addition to the standard querying, database management, data delivery, transformation and compression activities provided.

Officially supported databases are:

MySQL 3.2.x / 4.0.x
DB2 8
Oracle 9
Xindice 1.0

Additionally - though not officially supported - most databases with JDBC, ODBC or XML:DB interfaces which support the SQL or XPath query languages can be published using OGSA-DAI. Supported data delivery methods include SOAP, GridFTP and HTTP(S) streams.

New features for this release of OGSA-DAI (r3.1.1) include full message level security support, a technical preview of the Java Client Toolkit API (to aid development of applications using OGSA-DAI), and prototypes of CSV and BinX file access functionality.

Further information can be found on the OGSA-DAI website and in the Release Notes

Known Issues

Bug 1560 - Systems without libxml2 installed will have build failures relating to -lxml2.
There is a problem with GridFTP's data channel authentication when using a CAS credential.
Bug 1561 - PBS job fails when using RSL attribute - library_path
Bug 1562 - Condor jobs fail when running globus-sh-exec job

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