vas's blog

We are delighted to see NSF announce the 2022 edition of the Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program. Over the years, this program has greatly enhanced research infrastructure at institutions of all sizes, particularly by supporting the deployment of the Science DMZ infrastructure that is so important for data-intensive research.

The highly anticipated v5.4 of Globus Connect Server is now available. This release continues our march towards a unified Globus Connect Server v5 platform that incorporates all relevant features from prior versions.

We are changing our policy governing retention of file transfer activity data. Starting December 4, 2017, we will remove summary data for file transfer tasks older than 3 months. While metrics indicate that users rarely access this information, we will continue to allow downloading of summary usage data (up to three months old) via the transfer API. Detailed information about file transfer tasks, such as individual events, will be stored for 30 days, after which only summary data for tasks are stored.

A few months ago we announced that support for the open source Globus Toolkit is ending. Since then we've become aware of confusion regarding the details and impact of this announcement, so I thought I would try to clarify things a bit.

Here are the important facts:

We are announcing that, starting in January 2018, the Globus team at the University of Chicago will no longer support the open source Globus Toolkit, except for its use with the Globus cloud service by Globus subscribers. By the end of 2018, all endpoints connected to the Globus cloud service using the open source Globus Toolkit GridFTP server must migrate to Globus Connect. At the end of 2018, we will discontinue all maintenance (including security patches) and distribution of the open source Globus Toolkit.

Several users have requested a native command line client to Globus services that can be installed on a local machine and used for simple scripting. We have just released a beta version of a new command line client that you can download and use with the Globus file transfer and sharing service. This is a native Python client application, and is available to all users. Documentation for this beta release is available in our Github repo. We invite you to try the new client and send any questions and feedback to support@globus.org.

We're excited to announce that we're taking GlobusWorld on the road! Over the next few months we will be conducting a series of workshops at university campuses and national facilities around the country.

Globus subscriptions have changed. Based on feedback from, and discussions with, existing subscribers we have moved away from a usage-based model to unlimited-use subscriptions with access to different sets of premium features. This change was motivated primarily by two recurring themes that came up in our conversations:

The certificate used by Globus Connect Personal endpoints to securely connect to Globus expires on August 9, 2016. We released updated packages with new certificates a few weeks ago. If you have not yet updated your Globus Connect Personal installation, you must do so before August 9th so that your endpoint continues to work.

Late last year we deprecated the scp command in the Globus command line interface (CLI), and provided features in the transfer command for parity. In the nine months since it was deprecated, most users have moved to using the transfer command and there is little use of the scp command.