The Grid: Beyond the Hype

Abstract

Grid technologies and infrastructure support the integration of services and resources within and among enterprises, and thus allow new approaches to problem solving and interaction within distributed, multi-organizational collaborations. First developed and applied within eScience, Grid tools are now increasingly being applied in commercial settings as well. In this talk I discuss the current state and planned future directions for one particular collection of Grid technologies, namely the open source Globus Toolkit. I examine, in turn, the underlying requirements that motivate its design; the components that it provides for security, resource access, resource discovery, data management, and other purposes; the protocol and interface standards that underlie its design and implementation; the ecosystem of complementary tools, deployments, and applications that build on and/or complement these components; and the nature of the most urgent challenges that must be overcome to expand its utility and breadth of application.