foster's blog

The petabytes produced and consumed by exascale computers must often be moved among elements of the international scientific infrastructure. Scientists have long relied upon Globus for efficient, reliable, and secure data movement, and indeed as of 10/18/2021, Globus has been used to move more than 10¹⁸ bytes (1,343,546,072,100,387,000,000 bytes to be precise) among more than 20,000 labs worldwide.

Reflections from Globus Co-Founder Ian Foster

2020 marks the 10-year anniversary of the Globus service as we know it today. It also promises to be a monumental year for the product and team, for many reasons, not least because we’ll likely reach one exabyte (10^18 bytes) transferred as Globus usage continues to grow. I want to take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come, and where we plan to go in 2020 and beyond.

Missing Steve

It is with tremendous sadness that we share the news of the death of our dear friend and colleague Steve Tuecke on November 2, 2019.

Our thoughts are especially with his family at this moment. We too, are heartbroken.

New Year's Reflections from Globus Co-Founder Ian Foster

Happy New Year!

As 2017 fades into memory, I thought it might be interesting to reflect a bit on where we’ve been and where we plan to be this year. Here are some things I’ve observed recently and a few that I plan to keep an eye on.

Researchers who move data over the Internet with tools such as FTP on the TCP communication protocol to detect and retransmit data packets that have become corrupted in transit. It turns out that in doing so, they are leaning on an extremely weak reed. A 16-bit checksum means that 1 in 65,536 bad packets will be erroneously accepted as correct. You might think that corrupted packets are rare.

If This Then That (www.ifttt.com) is an intriguing new service for managing and integrating social media. It lets you specify simple rules of the form:

if <this event> then do <that action>

...where <this event> may be something like arrival of an email, a local weather forecast of rain, or a new blog post on Tumblr, and <that action> can be something like send an SMS message or an email, or post to EverNote or Facebook.

In our work with many hundreds of researchers who work in smaller labs, we’ve learned a few things about what is likely to be adopted and what is likely to go nowhere. For these scientists, who represent the majority of researchers working today, cyberinfrastructure can’t be delivered by providing software to be installed in a lab: they too often lack the local infrastructure and expertise.

As I pondered what tone to set for this blog, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the professional researcher. While I’ve lived that life, the everyday life of the dedicated, full-time researcher today has changed (and is changing) beyond what I’ve experienced, and I feel for you all out there who are challenged day-in, day-out with getting your work done in a rapidly changing world. For many researchers today, it’s all about wrangling massive data using faster and faster computers, while also struggling to keep ahead of the crowd by forging and sustaining ever-more-ambitious interdisciplinary collaborations. Those of you who have access to the right tools for these tasks are in the minority: Sure, big science projects have capabilities for getting and working with the data they need. But the average hardworking independent researcher or smaller lab does not. So the challenge (and opportunity) is to make these capabilities accessible not just to a few “big science” projects but to every researcher everywhere.

Welcome to the Globus Online blog! On these pages we plan to present/discuss/debate a range of topics dear to the hearts of computational researchers: data movement, information sharing and collaboration, SaaS tools for researchers, grid vs. cloud (and who cares), and of course Monty Python. Most importantly, we will highlight stories about – and from – users who have found ways to use Globus Online to improve their work. The goal is to create a resource and forum to help make your lives easier.