Globus Toolkit Version 4: Software for Service-Oriented Systems

The Globus Toolkit (GT) has been developed since thelate 1990s to support the development of service-oriented distributedcomputing applications and infrastructures. Core GT components address,within a common framework, fundamental issues relating to security,resource access, resource management, data movement, resourcediscovery, and so forth. These components enable a broader "Globusecosystem" of tools and components that build on, or interoperate with,GT functionality to provide a wide range of useful application-levelfunctions. These tools have in turn been used to develop a wide rangeof both "Grid" infrastructures and distributed applications. Isummarize here the principal characteristics of the recent WebServices-based GT4 release, which provides significant improvementsover previous releases in terms of robustness, performance, usability,documentation, standards compliance, and functionality. I alsointroduce the new "dev.globus" community development process, whichallows a larger community to contribute to the development of Globussoftware.