An Early and Incomplete Draft

The Globus Toolkit (GT) has been developed since the late 1990s to support the development of service-oriented distributed computing applications and infrastructures. Core GT components address basic issues relating to security, resource access and management, data movement and management, resource discovery, and so forth. A broader “Globus universe ” comprises numerous tools and components that build on core GT4 functionality to provide many useful application-level functions. These tools have been used to develop many Grid systems and applications. Version 4 of the Globus Toolkit, GT4, released in 2005, represents a significant advance relative to the GT3 implementation of Web services functionality in terms of the range of components provided, functionality, standards conformance, usability, and quality of documentation. This document provides an introduction to key features of both GT4 and associated tools, and the ways in which these components can be used to develop Grid infrastructures and applications. Its focus is on the user’s view of the technology and its application, and the practical techniques that should be employed to develop GT4-based applications. We discuss in turn the applications that motivate the development of GT4 and related tools; the four tasks involved in building Grids: design, deployment, application, operations; GT4 structure