Globus Toolkit's Future

Today Ian Foster sent out an email about Globus' future plans, which contains many interesting points.

First, a GRAM5 (for job submission) will come out as a replacement for both GRAM2 (old fashion) and GRAM4 (web service based). It confirms my feeling that web service based job submission such as GridSAM does not pick up enough users. The old fashion job submission just can not be retired at this moment.

Second, the Java web service core will be re-implemented to leverage state-of-the-art technologies. Apache CXF is selected as the web service development kit. See here for a very informative comparison between several popular latest the web service development kits including Apache CXF, Apache Axis2 and Metro (the JAX-WS RI). Apache CXF is favored over Apache Axis2 because Axis2 uses proprietary deployment model and lacks the support for IoC containers such as Spring Framework.

Third, globus.org will provide RFT (reliable file transfer) online service, which provides reliable, high-performance, end-to-end, fire-and-forget data transfer. globus.org has moved into the era of cloud computing!

Fourth, MDS (monitoring and discovery service) will be refactored to separate monitoring and service/resource discovery. Monitoring will be left to mature dedicated monitor softwares. MDS itself will focus on acting as a service registry. I certainly agree this decision since it favors the idea of separating concerns. The recently published GLUE2 spec still mixes up monitoring data and service metadata for discovery. It is interesting to see if the future development of GLUE will reflect the decision made on MDS.

Access UK NGS

UK NGS provides national wide grid service. The following is what I have done in order to access NGS facilities.

1. Apply for a UK e-Science certificate.
2. Apply for an NGS account.
3. Install Globus Toolkit 4.2.1. export $GLOBUS_LOCATION=/usr/local/globus-4.2.1; configure --prefix=$GLOBUS_LOCATION; make; make install Because my linux box is running RHEL5, I chose to install from source to make use of openssl 0.9.8. Before I installed GT, I also installed a perl-XML-parser which had been missing. The compilation of GT from source took a couple of hours. So be patient.
   
4. Install my UK e-Science certificate: see the section below the heading "Installing your e-Science Certificate and Private Key".
5. Install UK e-Science CA certificate and signing policy. On the NGS CA certificate page, download CA certificate files 367b75c3.0 and 98ef0ee5.0, and signing policy files 367b75c3.signing_policy and 98ef0ee5.signing_policy. Save them into $HOME/.globus/certificates.
6. Set up running environment. source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh
   
7. Create a proxy certificate. grid-proxy-init -verify -debug This should not display any error message. To display the current proxy certificate: grid-proxy-info. To destroy the current proxy certificate: grid-proxy-destroy
8. Use gsissh to connect to NGS nodes. gsissh -p 2222 ngs.rl.ac.uk It uses the proxy certificate, so does not prompt for username and password.
9. Upload the proxy certificate to the MyProxy server. myproxy-init -s myproxy.grid-support.ac.uk -l wjfang Use "-l" to specify a unique username used in the myproxy server. During the execution, you will be prompted to enter a MyProxy pass phrase. Together with the username, the pass phrase allows to access the proxy certificate stored in the MyProxy server.
10. Now I can log into NGS Application Repository even on a different machine using my MyProxy username and pass phrase.