glogin - a multifunctional, interactive tunnel into the grid

Interactivity on the grid is an interesting aspect of many ongoing research projects. In this context, the glogin tool provides a light-weight solution for bidirectional, interactive and secure connections between arbitrary grid nodes and the users' clients. By submitting it as a regular grid job, glogin establishes itself as a bridgehead for tunneling of arbitrary traffic into and out of the grid. With this approach, glogin is able to offer different interactive services, such as standard shell functionality, TCP forwarding (including remote X11 displays), and grid-enabled virtual private networks (VPN). The current implementation o/glogin uses the Globus Toolkit GT2, although other grid middleware toolkits may utilize the same technology.