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Globus software plugs
users into the grid

by Chad Boutin

When you need electrical power, you don't buy your own generator – you flip a switch and pay the electric company for the watts you use. Soon you may be able to buy computing power just as simply.

Argonne computer scientists have developed software called Globus that enables thousands of far-flung computers to function together as one large virtual computer called a grid. A computing grid solves complex problems by parceling out jobs among its thousands of processors into manageable pieces, permitting it to solve more complicated problems than any single computer ever could.

BLACK-HOLE COLLISIONS – Researchers used the Globus Toolkit to harness the power of multiple supercomputers to simulate the gravitational effects of black-hole collisions. The team, which included researchers from Argonne, the University of Chicago, Northern Illinois University and the Max Planck institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, was awarded a prestigious Gordon Bell prize for its work. Image courtesy of Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.

"The goal is for grids to provide accessible computing power in the way that the World Wide Web provides information," said Ian Foster, associate director of Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science Division and professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. "By plugging into the grid, your own computer's abilities will be dramatically increased. Research facilities will no longer have to vie for the largest, fastest computers to handle increasingly complex research problems."

Globus software was named one of the top 100 research developments of the year by R&D magazine.

Grids open for business

Hailed by the computer industry as the next step in the Internet evolution, what grids can do for scientists in the short run could pale in comparison to what they may do for commerce in the long run. The leader of IBM's grid initiative, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, is betting that computing power will evolve into a simple utility – like electricity – with businesses buying what they need from a computing grid instead of owning large computers themselves.

"You'll get computing power and storage capacity – not from your own computer – but over the Internet on demand," said Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy in the IBM server group. "You'll pay for what you use, pretty much the way you do with electric power."

GLOBUS TEAM – The Globus software creators are (from left) Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman and Steve Tuecke.

The Globus software allows users to tap into this power, and commercial interest is growing. IBM recently released Globus on CD-ROM for its computers and plans to invest $4 billion to construct 50 computer centers around the world from which consumers can buy computing time. IBM also recently awarded a major grant to the Globus project to support further development, while Microsoft contributed $1 million this year to the Globus project for making Windows grid-accessible. Sun already offers Globus software for corporate-wide applications, and Platform Inc. is providing commercial support.

Globus - the key to computing grids

The key to coordinating computers into grids is the Globus Toolkit, a software package developed under the leadership of Foster and Carl Kesselman of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, along with Steve Tuecke, who serves as senior architect at Argonne. Globus provides computers made by different manufacturers with a common language that enables them to work together. These large, scientific computers use different languages depending on the manufacturer, making them notoriously difficult to link-the challenge has been compared with getting cell phones to communicate with toasters.

But Globus not only gets different computers talking, it protects these conversations from unauthorized users with its powerful security system. The software allows a single user to gain access to the grid's processing power with a single password but without compromising the security of the grid's individual computers, which are owned by many different users.

This combination of universal communication with powerful security has convinced computer industry giants that Globus-based grids are the future of high-end computing.

The idea for grids grew out of computer scientists' desire to coax more power out of computers.

In the early 1990s, before the Internet was a household word, Rick Stevens and Tom DeFanti were considering how to get more out of their networks. Stevens, Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Sciences Division director and University of Chicago professor, realized that computer networks could do far more than just relay email messages, so he joined forces with Defanti of the University of Illinois-Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

"We saw that people could connect with the Web to share information," Stevens said. "But we also saw that if you connected processing power and other resources together as well, you could do quantitatively and qualitatively new things. So we set out to show other researchers what could be done."

ENABLING THE GRID – The Globus Toolkit and the grid allow researchers at many facilities to integrate instruments, displays and computer resources to attack increasingly complex scientific challenges.

In December 1995, Stevens, DeFanti and their colleagues demonstrated their vision of the future of computing for one week at the Supercomputing '95 conference. Using borrowed equipment from several institutions, they built a temporary grid called I-WAY. I-WAY's selling card was that it was an economical way of testing the software and hardware they believed would be the foundation of the next-generation Internet.

Foster's group created that software, which allowed conference participants to meet in virtual reality environments created by computers physically separated by thousands of miles. When I-WAY proved a resounding success at Supercomputing '95, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency supplied funding to continue grid research. Foster's group then set about expanding their early software into the Globus Toolkit, incorporating lessons learned from the I-WAY project.

"I-WAY showed us two of the main problems we had to confront if we were ever going to make grids practical," said Tuecke. "We had to provide all the different computers with a common language so they could understand their piece of a problem when it came in, and we had to ensure that when they shared data it would not compromise individual security policies. How do you coordinate such disparate computer models owned by lots of individuals without taking away any individual's privacy?"

The answer was to create a set of "extensions" to existing Internet security software. These extensions allow authorized grid users to delegate their personal authority to the computing task itself, enabling it to act on the users' behalf.

"When you log onto the Internet today, you have the ability to keep communication private between yourself and another user," Tuecke explained. "What you can't do now is tell a computing job to take your credentials and use them itself to communicate for you by proxy. But now, because of these Globus extensions, the computing task can 'become you' and request the use of processing power elsewhere on the grid. They allow a large computing task to be divided between all of the grid's computers."

These innovations made the Globus Toolkit the first widely available and adopted grid software and helped it achieve wide acceptance in the world of computational science. NASA adopted Globus for its Information Power Grid Project in 1998 and provided funding for Foster's group. The National Science Foundation and Department of Energy have also provided funding.

"Globus is now being used at hundreds of local grid sites around the world," Foster said. "We've built a foundation that has become the standard for high-end systems."

While a planet-wide grid is still years away, many grid projects are international. Here are some examples of grid sites using Globus:

• The Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) provides computing resources to study the fundamental forces of nature and the structure of the universe. The data obtained at large particle accelerators and astronomical observatories comes at a rate of petabytes - quadrillions of bytes per year - which is enough to fill the memory of billions of desktop computers. The GriPhyN collaboration, led by Foster and Paul Avery of the University of Florida, will permit researchers to analyze data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Large Hadron Collider accelerator now under construction at CERN physics laboratory in Switzerland.
• The Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Grid (NEESgrid) links earthquake research sites across the country. NEESgrid connects researchers with databases and earthquake simulation tools such as wave tanks and shake tables. Far-flung users can conduct experiments and share results together in a virtual laboratory, which should lead to more efficient design of earthquake-resistant buildings.
• The Access Grid aims to create collaborative environments for large groups of people. Large-scale scientific and technical collaborations often involve multiple teams from different cities working together. By managing high-end audiovisual technology, the Access Grid will support large-scale distributed meetings, collaborative teamwork sessions and seminars for the business and science communities.

Future grids

Specific applications for grid computing are still being developed, but its potential is dramatic, according to Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst for Illuminata Inc., a New Hampshire technology research firm.

"It's important to remember that many of the big scientific advances of recent years came from mathematical modeling," Eunice said. "Grid computing, with its practically unlimited data storage and enormous computing power, could accelerate math-intensive research into a cancer cure, oil exploration or climate prediction."

For more information, please contact Dave Jacqué (630/252-5582 or info@anl.gov) at Argonne.