Our group has done considerable work in collaboration with scientific communities, developing applications that take advantage of the middleware capabilities offered by the Globus Toolkit. We have learned through this collaboration that access to distributed data is typically as important as access to distributed computational resources .
Future applications envisioned by our team also require widely distributed access to data.
The distributed scientific computing community has envisioned a number of strategies for supporting these application needs. We offer the following papers that outline our proposed strategy. Since the Globus Project focuses on middleware issues, it is our intent to offer a generic infrastructure in the form of core data transfer services and generic data management libraries. These fundamental building blocks can then be used in a variety of interesting ways to build systems and applications. The Globus Project is currently engaged in defining and developing the following core capabilities which we believe will be necessary in order to build a persistent Data Grid environment.