The Globus Consortium for grid computing has announced three projects promoting the Globus Toolkit. The projects focus on Web services, bug fixes, and internationalisation.
The open source toolkit is for building grid computing infrastructure. Projects unveiled pertain to Version 4.0 of the toolkit, which was released by another organisation, the Globus Alliance, last week. Featuring members such as HP, IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems, the consortium promotes the toolkit for use in enterprises, whereas the alliance develops the toolkit itself.
In the area of Web services, the consortium is seeking to extend the OASIS Web Services Resource Framework (WS-RF) specifications for use in grid deployments. Extensions will be submitted back to OASIS for consideration, according to president of the consortium, Greg Nawrocki. Submissions are to be based on the WS-GRAM (Grid Resource Allocation Manager) technology, which is an alliance implementation of WS-RF.
"There are standards being worked on in these standards bodies that have to do with resource management and resource allocation," Nawrocki said.
"They are really good, but they don't necessarily go as far as they should to do an actual implementation. We've actually extended those standards and we've actually done an implementation with the latest release of the Globus Toolkit.
"Resource allocation and management is huge for grid."
The consortium is also funding efforts for bug fixes and enhancements to the toolkit, in conjunction with a system that gives consortium members a priority response for bugs they submit. All fixes are to be included in the toolkit. This project also involves porting critical resource management test suites and code examples from Version 3.0 of the toolkit to Version 4.0.
With the consortium's internationalisation project, use of multibyte characters will be a focus. Documentation is being improved for international developers based on a survey pertaining to globalization.
The consortium is also launching a monthly newsletter pertaining to grid. It's free to subscribers at globusconsortium.org/journal.
