INDUSTRY

By Tom Garritano of the GRIDS Center -- GlobusWORLD 2004 begins January 20 with three days full of keynotes, sessions and dialogues on Grid computing. Then, to dive even deeper, attendees should stay for one of the workshops (http://www.globusworld.org/program/workshops.asp) offered Friday, January 23, on topics of importance to the Globus Toolkit® (GT) community of users and developers. GT is a suite of open-source, open-architecture software and services that are central to the growing field of Grid computing. The workshops are: • The Grid for Financial Services • The Grid for Life Sciences and Medical Imaging • Build a Grid Service with GT3 • GT Security GlobusWORLD is offering a Financial Services workshop because that industry is among early Grid adopters. IT companies are using Grid middleware to help customers improve their applications' scalability, reliability and performance, while optimizing resource utilization and increasing revenue. "Whether deployed on Linux, UNIX or Windows systems, the Grid accelerates time-to-deploy, and is especially suited to high-computational and data- or volume-intensive applications,” said Frank Cicio, chief operating officer for DataSynapse, which is organizing the Financial Services workshop. The Life Sciences and Medical Imaging workshop organized by IBM will feature talks from the pharmaceutical industry (including Johnson & Johnson) and medical imaging (including Siemens Research and Harvard Medical School). A significant portion of the workshop will address aspects of the Grid's use for life sciences in academia and government. Finally, public and private sector solutions will be discussed, with talks by Grid technology vendors Hewlett-Packard, United Devices, Platform Computing, and Avaki. The “Build a Grid Service with GT3” workshop, two sessions of which sold out at the SC03 conference in November, will teach developers and technical managers to build a Grid service compliant with the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) specification. The workshop is organized as a series of hands-on exercises in which students add increasing functionality to a skeletal service implementation. Fundamental OGSI interactions and patterns are highlighted, in addition to GT3 security. Attendees must bring a wireless-enabled laptop pre-loaded with the small set of software listed at http://www.globus.org/ogsa/tutorials/SC03/. The GT Security workshop will cover security aspects of current grid software, and of future software releases. Topics include advanced configuration and internals, authorization solutions, and plans related to attribute certificates and more. Current authentication and message-protection tools include GSI SecureConversation, GSI SecureMessage and JAAS. Current authorization tools such as VOMS, CAS, PERMIS, and Akenti will be discussed in the context of Grid architecture. The workshop will also address possible directions related to proxy certificates and integration of existing authorization tools such as PERMIS and Shibboleth).