Globus Alliance Press Kit

The Globus Alliance is a research and software development project led by Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago) and Carl Kesselman (University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute), with additional leadership from the Globus Alliance Board.

The goal of the Globus Alliance is to make Grid computing (with all the benefits that it provides) a realistic possibility in science, engineering, business, and other situations where collaborative work happens.

This page provides some references to important facts and information about the Globus Alliance for use by members of the press.

Getting Started

For basic information about the Globus Alliance, the Globus Toolkit, and Grid computing, it is probably easiest to start with our Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ).

For an overview of Grid computing, a good reference is Chapter 2 ("Computational Grids") from the book The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, published by Morgan-Kaufman in 1999. Another high-level treatment of the subject can be found in the following article.

The Grid: A New Infrastructure for 21st Century Science. I. Foster. Physics Today, 55(2):42-47, 2002.

For a more detailed overview of the Grid, including specific architectural frameworks and the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), please review the following two papers.

The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations. I. Foster, C. Kesselman, S. Tuecke. International J. Supercomputer Applications, 15(3), 2001.

The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration. I. Foster, C. Kesselman, J. Nick, S. Tuecke; January, 2002.

Contacts

Ian Foster Mathematics and Computer Science Argonne National Laboratory 9700 Cass Ave Argonne, IL, 60439 Tel: 630 252-4619 Fax: 630 252-5986 foster@mcs.anl.gov

Carl Kesselman USC/Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 Tel: 310 822-1511 x338 Fax: 310 823-6714 carl@isi.edu

Detailed Information

This website itself is the most comprehensive collection of information about the Globus Project and the Globus Toolkit. The various sections of the website detail everything from our future plans for the Globus Toolkit to the details of our Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), and much in between.