Thebes

Globus

Globus is the largest grid toolkit in use in the United States and has seen some adoption overseas. It is mostly focused on delivering discreet, specialized, services, currently with a heavy emphasis on web services. Its security layer is based on GSI, like many grid toolkits, and so uses X.509 certificates as the token format for individual identity information. However, the use of identity attributes within this framework has largely been absent to date.

GridShib

The GridShib project has attempted to bridge the gap between SAML and X.509 certificates within the grid. The basic setup is to extend a Shibboleth SAML Identify Provider (IdP) and create a file that maps from the grid certificate Domain Name (DN) to a principal name within the IdP. This work does not yet address the use of attributes, conveyed by SAML statements, within the grid. The management of the mapping file also means that most central IT departments are unlikely to deploy the solution within their campus infrastructure as it would require a significant investment while only serving a very limited set of users.

European Work

The largest grid effort is in Europe is the EU's Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) effort. At its core this work is based on the gLite infrastructure. Like Globus this library is firmly rooted in X.509 technologies and internally uses the same Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) library as Globus. Unlike some other grid efforts the EGEE is attempting to make a complete transition to web services instead of supporting two (or more) access protocols. This effort will likely make the develop of the underlying grid software easier, as there will be fewer items that must be abstracted but such a transition will take at least a couple of years.

In addition to the EU wide EGEE system many national or regional grids (e.g. NorduGrid, BalticGrid). There are also domain specific grids (e.g. BioInfoGrid). Most of these are also based on gLite with significant extensions relating to the particular need of the region/domain.

Solutions Elsewhere

Grid work in Asia is, in some ways, the most divergent grid work in the world, in that they have written most of their software from scratch, and in other ways is perhaps the most compatible, in that they attempt to follow the Global Grid Forum's recommendations for standards. Some examples of this are Japan's NAREGI and China's CNGrid. Many Asian grids have a much stronger focus on the connection of computational resources than American or European grids which tend to be more focused on operational specific services (e.g. de-noising datasets). Because of this focus there is a heavier emphasis on interfacing supercomputer and cycle scavenging components with the grid.

Ganglia

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization. It uses carefully engineered data structures and algorithms to achieve very low per-node overheads and high concurrency. The implementation is robust, has been ported to an extensive set of operating systems and processor architectures, and is currently in use on thousands of clusters around the world. It has been used to link clusters across university campuses and around the world and can scale to handle clusters with 2000 nodes.