Folks, I'd like to announce that we have completed initial testing of a Linux for S/390 and Linux for z/Series port of the Globus grid computing tools. I'll be putting together a binary package shortly for the Globus team to distribute via their WWW site, and they will remain the distribution point. A port of Globus for USS on z/OS is also in progress, but is moving slower than I would like -- testing is showing a lot of difficulties in assumptions in USS that are a pain to work around.
What is Globus? It's a collection of tools for writing and managing distributed applications across multiple systems and multiple organizations. It includes brokering of available resources, generalized security and authorization APIs, task assignment, job managment and storage management services that provide a wide range of interesting services and ways to write applications that take advantage of distributed computing power while still remaining centrally controlled in a reasonable fashion. It was originally written for large scientific applications, but is rapidly becoming interesting for enterprise applications as well. You can read more about Globus at http://www.globus.org. I hope to have the packages put together in the next week or so. If you're interested in working on the USS port (and can afford a lot of time and post-port therapy), please get it touch with me off-list. I'm running into some things that I really need to talk to someone else with USS experience to see what the best way to fix some things would be. My complements to the Globus team for writing nice, clean, well-commented code. The Linux port was remarkably painless. As a side note, while a 390 is probably not all that interesting for computational work, the storage management and security APIs in Globus are vastly better than most OS-dependent ones, and allow writing very portable code. If you're writing enterprise apps that need unified authorization architecture, this is really interesting stuff, as Globus does a really good job of providing an opaque layer on top of lots of different security systems. -- db David Boyes CTO Sine Nomine Associates
