Monday, September 18, 2006

Globus turns 10! Enjoy the happy Birthday


Fron Ian Foster, The Globus Pioneers words! on the event of 10th birthday of Globus.
The GlobusWORLD conference being held (jointly with GridWorld and the Open Grid Forum) this week in Washington, D.C., is a significant milestone for those involved in the development and use of the Globus open source Grid software. The reason is that it was 10 years ago (to be precise, on Aug. 21, 1996) that Carl Kesselman and I received our first funding for work on Globus, from DARPA. Gary Minden and Mike St. Johns were our enlightened program managers, followed by Gary Koob. I must also recognize the support of Bob Aiken, Tom Kitchens and, especially, Mary Anne Scott, then all at DoE.

Given this milestone, I will spend some time here recapping history and reflecting on where we have come and what we have learned.

A Little History

10 years is a long time: What on earth have we been doing over that period? Let's revisit some of the highlights.

The emergence of high-speed networks in the 1990s led to an awareness that the Internet could allow for more interesting applications than e-mail and file transfer. (Len Kleinrock had envisioned this possibility back in 1969, but it took a while to get there!) Efforts like the U.S. Gigabit testbed project, led by Bob Kahn, and the Supercomputing'95 I-WAY effort, led by Tom DeFanti and Rick Stevens, helped build awareness of these opportunities. This era also saw pioneering efforts such as the NSF Metacenter, led by Charlie Catlett and Larry Smarr, and Legion, led by Andrew Grimshaw. However, for the most part, every application was constructed from scratch.
Read the complete article at Gridtoday.

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