The Globus project: a status report

The Globus project is a multi-institutional research effort that seeks to enable the construction of computational grids providing pervasive, dependable, and consistent access to high-performance computational resources, despite geographical distribution of both resources and users. Computational grid technology is being viewed as a critical element of future high-performance computing environments that will enable entirely new classes of computation-oriented applications, much as the World Wide Web fostered the development of new classes of information-oriented applications. The authors report on the status of the Globus project as of early 1998. They describe the progress that has been achieved to date in the development of the Globus toolkit, a set of core services for constructing grid tools and applications. They also discuss the Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed (GUSTO) that they have constructed to enable large-scale evaluation of Globus technologies, and they review early experiences with the development of large-scale grid applications on the GUSTO testbed.