Installing GT4 and writing grid services

Globus 4 is the third system in my benchmarking comparison in addition to Tycho and R-GMA. I have installed GT4 and have modified some code from a Globus World tutorial.

I did a binary install onto a compute node in the cluster running Debian. You can read about it on the wiki. Half way through the install I was stuck with doing the security parts and I found a walk through for the whole install process: http://www-unix.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.0/admin/docbook/quickstart.html If you want to install Globus follow that guide.

I was very stuck trying to write hello world grid service I could not find examples to follow and could not understand the documentation. In the end with Mark’s help I found a tutorial which was available on the web: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~childers/tutorials/BAS/GW2005/ I was able to complete the tutorial and had a working grid service, I also have a batter understanding of how the services in Globus work together.

The tutorial service is very simple, it lets you save a ‘note’ in a service and demonstrates the persistence which is one of the features of WSRF. The problem I have is this simple service (which only has one method) is a complete bastard to understand. To illustrate this are the sizes of the build directories for all three of the systems I am testing:


jaws:workspace/$ find gt4/build | wc -l
101
jaws:workspace/$ find r-gma/build | wc -l
2
jaws:workspace/$ find tycho/build | wc -l
2


Now some of that 101 files is not needed for the most basic GT4 service, how ever you try and go through that stuff and work out what can and can’t be removed. My notes on the tutorial and my attempts to alter it to do what I need for my testing are on the wiki.

I am continuing my hacking to get a grid service which will publish some information about itself and a client which can discover the services.