Semi-permanent links:

Grid Technology Repository. The offcial site from which to get formal releases of grid software. Notably, the place to get both GlobusToolkit3 and OGSA-DAI.

Globus toolkit v2. The most-recent version of the orginal compute-grid kit from the Globus project.

Globus Toolkit v3. The emerging replacement for v2 of the Globus Toolkit, implementing much of the OGSI specification.

OGSA: Open Grid Services Architecture. The new grid infrastructure based around web services.

CoG: Commodity Grid kits. Client stuff for using the Globus toolkit from Java etc.

JFTP. Code for driving vanilla FTP and GridFTP from Java programmes.

IBM "red book" on Fundementals of Grid Computing (25 pages). This is a very broad introduction to grids (mainly the computational kind rather than data grids or service grids). It might be a good starting point for somebody who has no previous knowledge of grids. There are lamost no technical details in this paper.

IBM "red book": Introduction to Grid Computing with Globus (310 pages). This is a highly-extensive look at compute-grid technology a la Globus (with more than a nod to other compute-grid tool-kits) plus a write-up of some examples and detailed technical advice on working with Globus Toolkit v2. If anybody still needs to use GT2, then this paper may be the best place to start. There is some discussion of OGSA but no detailed advice on working with currently-available OGSI stuff.

Step-by-step guide to installing and using GT3. This is a third-party document by Francisco Javier Cano Linares at QUB, prepared from his experiences as a GT3 user. I don't know yet how accurate it is, but this kind of empirical write-up is often very valuable.

Blogwise:

2003-04-24

GT3 alpha 2, JUnit, ant and JDK 1.4.x in combination have a problem. Some calls to the junit task in ant fail because of class-loader errors when linking org.xml.sax.InputStream. That class is provided in xmlParserAPIs.jar in GT3 alpha 2, coutesy of Xerces, and I think the Xerces version of it is inappropriate. The problem is (probably) that ant and JUnit have used the definition from the JDK and GT3 is trying to use the definition from Xerces; the class loader sees this as an attack and rejects it. The cure seems to be to delete xmlParseAPIs.jar from GT3 and hence to get the classes from the JDK.

2003-03-11

If you use Tomcat with GT3, beware of mixing versions of GT3. I have just lost several hours work by using a Tomcat installation with GT3 alpha 3 and traces of GT3 TP4. The versions of GT3 are incompatible, so one needs to delete the ogsa web-app and to redeploy it when switching versions.

2003-03-06

At the second OGSI-WG meeting in GGF7, the group decided to put forward the final draft of the OGSI specification into the GGF document track for standardization. This means that v1 of OGSI is now fully defined, apart from vanishingly-small tweaks to the wording. The group decided to delay work on a putative v2 OGSI until after v1.2 of the WDSL standard appears.

2003-03-06

The alpha-3 release of GlobusToolkit3 is now available.

2003-02-26
From Gregor von Laszewski on the globus-java mailing-list:

Subject: Re: [globus-java] Java and globus-job-get-output?

This article does not address for example gridFTP which you could be also using.

one of the problems you need to address is what happens when the network goes down. E.g. you need to catch and hande the exceptions properly. In your quest of a simpler "wrapper" please keep this in mind. Thus, I personally never realy redirect the output of a job directly to me. I recommend that you put it on the server first and stream it in a seperate process over to you.

gridFTP and urlcopy are probably the most straight forward interfaces.

That's in reference to GT2, but it's an interesting, general principle for our GT3 service-grids.

2003-02-24
From the ogsa-alpha mailing-list:

Hi,
When I deploy my client code to a different host other than where the service resides, Do I have to install GT3 alpha on the client machine? if not. What are the minimal set of jars I need to copy to the client machine?
[...]
Many thanks
Eric Ye

...which is a very good question. Thomas Sandholm replies:

At a minimum you need to have a distribution of GT3 core on the client machine. Then depending on what service you want to talk you also need to get their respective client jars. The reason why we don't have any distinction in core between client and server is that all clients may also act as servers, for instance in the case of notification callbacks. An example of an automatic client distribution is our webstart sample. If you look at the webstart/ogsa.jnlp file in the source distribution of GT3 core you will see what jars are required to run all the samples from a client machine.
/Thomas

2003-01-31
From Steve Graham on the ogsi-wg mailing-list:

Subject: Re: [ogsi-wg] GSDL and WSDL 1.2
Since the WSDL spec is an interim draft, we are going to define a temporary solution, extending WSDL 1.1 porttype to include portType inheritance and open content model. This model will be based on the current WSDL 1.2 draft. Of course in the next draft of GS Spec, we will deprecate this temporary solution in favor of using WSDL 1.2 as the W3C finalizes it.

Therefore, we should expect some niggling incompatibilities between software versions either before standardization, as the OGSA standard tracks the WSDL drafts, or just after, as the OGSA standard gets pinch-barred into complience with the WSDL standard.

2003-01-27
From Thomas Sandholm concerning the interplay of Axis and GT3:

Yes we are aware of this change in the axis stub compiler which is the very reason we chose not to upgrade before the alpha release. As I mentioned in an earlier mail today, we will upgrade as soon as alpha-2 is out the door next week. I also expect us to sync up with Axis 1.1 once that is released, but it all depends on how well that version works with our code and whether we need to put in patches for it to work for us. So in other words it is not recommended to try out your own versions of axis with our code at this point but to use the version we ship with, which has been tested by us. /Thomas

2003-01-24
GT3 alpha 1 has been out for a week or so now. The ogsa-alpha mailing-list is crowded with requests for help with problems, but nobody is saying that it flatly won't work and the email support has been timely and helpful. Proceed with caution. There is word of a GT3 alpha-2 release to come in a few weeks. This will have bug-fixes, optimizations and new features.

My initial test on GT3 alpha-1 was to build and run the ag-ogsa-echo package (see AGEchoServiceV2 for details). The no-security, basic-echo service builds and runs without changes; i.e. GT3 alpha-1 is compatible with GT3 TP-5 for this service. GT3 alpha-1 is faster than GT3 TP-5 by about a factor of two in these tests. The secure-service code seems to be incompatible with GT2 utilities. I.e., the proxy certificate generated from the permanent certificate by grid-proxy-init in GT2.2 isn't accepted by GT3 services. The grid-proxy-init in GT3 isn't yet available either as source code or compiled for Solaris, so I don't know if it fixes the problem.

2003-01-14
The public alpha-version of Globus toolkit 3 is now available for download. This product is the Globus project's implementation of OGSI. It replaces the "technology preview" releases of GT3 that have been used in AstroGrid experiments to date.

2002-12-13
From Robert Seed at ANL (ex ogsa-alpha mailing-list):

> does that the globus toolkit v3.0 will be tightly
> coupled with JBoss? or is it possible to use any J2EE
> compliant app server?

You can use any J2EE app server. Globus toolkit 3.0 will not be tightly coupled with JBoss, it will be preconfigured to work with JBoss or WebSphere out of the box, any other app server will work if you do the configuration yourself.

[...]

Globus toolkit 3.0 uses Axis and the JAX-RPC api for its web service support, which is in line with JSR 109. GT3 will not use the web service support provided by an existing app server - you can not turn an ejb into a web service using the WSDL and SOAP tools provided by WebLogic (or something else) and then use GT3 as a proxy to expose it a grid service - you must use the WSDL and SOAP tools provided by GT3.

2002-12-18
OGSA-TP-5 (fifth alpha release of Globus Toolkit 3) is out. Preliminary tests show that the AstroGrid echo task runs unchanged with OGSA-TP-5 so the changes from OGSA-TP-4 aren't too drastic. Any AstroGrid folk who haven't yet deployed an OGSA environment should go for OGSA-TP-5 in preference to earlier versions.

Previous documents by me (e.g. AGEchoServiceV2) suggested that in order to implement a grid service one had to write one class for the service itself and another for the service's factory. The improved documentation in OGSA-TP-5 shows that this is now untrue (and may always have been so): one doesn't need to write the factory. OGSA-TP-5 provides a generic factory that can create all simple kinds of grid service.

2002-11-06
A note from Gregor von Laszewski of the Java CoG team: the current CoG is compatible with Globus 2.0 servers but not very compatible with Globus 2.2 yet. They're working on it.

2002-11-05
V4 of the OGSA technology preview (OGSA-TP-4) is out. See here for the download page. This should replace the OGSA-TP-3 used in the AstroGrid echo service, but we need to check for compatibility first. More later...

-- GuyRixon