The Grid, a highly distributed computing environment that is seen by many as a step beyond the World Wide Web, is catalysing many new computing developments. One is GLOBUS, a toolkit that provides Grid building blocks.
At a recent GLOBUS Grid workshop at the UK Central Laboratories of the Research Councils, Steve Tuecke and Lee Liming from Ian Foster’s pioneer group at Argonne gave presentations at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, while the Daresbury Laboratory joined by videoconference. The sessions were recorded and will be available in RealVideo format (for details contact Rob Allan, e-mail “R.Allan@dl.ac.uk”).
The first day offered an introduction to the computational Grid and the GLOBUS toolkit, together with a user’s tutorial. The second day was a developer’s tutorial for Grid programming and went into significantly greater technical detail (common services and security, information services, resource management, remote data management, fault management and communications). The final day concentrated on directing the GLOBUS team’s expert advice onto current particle physics Grid activities and setting up future projects for collaboration with the Foster group.
The workshop was considered to be a great success and is undoubtedly the start of many focused Grid activities in the UK particle physics community.
