Some caGrid Considerations on Globus Hardening

Globus is a large toolkit, caGrid is a service oriented architecture and leverages the ws-core component of Globus. The TeraGrid infrastructure is different in that it mostly leverages other features of Globus such as GRAM and GridFTP. Thus each projects opinion on whether or not Globus is hardened is going to be closely tied to their experience with the components of the toolkit they use. Currently caGrid is using Globus 4.0.3, however many of our services will operate with Globus 4.0.X. The distribution of Globus that we link to on cagrid.org contains additional features/enhancements which have been added by working closely with the Globus team. The caGrid team monitors the Globus project closely to make sure any critical bug fixes are addressed as appropriate. With each Globus release, we look at and evaluate new features, some of which have been incorporated into the 4.0.3 distribution we provide. The main difference between the latest release of Globus and the version we are using is specification changes. Adopting the specification changes in caGrid would cause services developed on the earlier specifications to NOT interoperate with services developed on the newer specification. The specification differences are minor and this point not worth breaking interoperability between services. We do plan on adopting these specification changes with caGrid 2.0 but are waiting for the Globus folks to upgrade there web services environment, which should significantly improve performance. We would like to combine the specification upgrades and the web service environment upgrade into one release so that our users only need to upgrade their services once. Before answering your question I wanted to give you some insight on why caGrid uses the version of Globus that it does, however to answer your question, caGrid does not use a hardened version of Globus.