globus

Some research projects—particularly those with team members at multiple campuses—need to maintain copies of the project's data on a campus system and on an XSEDE system. (This need was recognized and documented by XSEDE's Campus Bridging initiative.) Keeping these copies synchronized is important, but it shouldn't be time-consuming for researchers. Cloud synchronization services like Dropbox and Google Drive aren't always practical for research data at supercomputing scale.

Globus has released a 3.0 version of its command-line interface, the Globus CLI. Globus is used throughout XSEDE for file transfers to and from XSEDE resources. Globus's web application is an easy-to-use, adaptive and responsive, mobile-friendly web interface for the Globus service.

The Globus project stopped maintaining the Globus Toolkit “GT” at the end of 2018. The Grid Community Forum (https://gridcf.org) forked the GT source to create the Grid Community Toolkit “GCT” (https://gridcf.org/gct-docs/) which is maintained by the research community. Some XSEDE Service Providers "SPs" have already transitioned from GT to GCT software.

The Globus team at the University of Chicago stopped development of the Globus Toolkit at the end of 2017 and plans to stop providing security patches by the end of 2018 [1].   XSEDE uses Globus Toolkit components in day-to-day operations.  Note, the Globus announcement does not affect XSEDE’s use of Globus file transfer and sharing cloud service (SaaS), Globus Auth identity and access management service, or the Globus Connect products.