Access Grid Toolkit 2 0 The Access Grid

Access Grid Toolkit 2. 0 The Access Grid (AG) is bringing groups of people together to enhance collaboration at a distance, allowing groups that are not collocated to work as a team, much in the same way the computational grid allows for disperse resources to be coupled together. The Access Grid technology (www. accessgrid. org) was developed by the Futures Laboratory in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and is now in use at over 150 institutions worldwide. As the AG community grows, so do its demands on the infrastructure that supports it; the AG’s current infrastructure will not scale to meet the needs of the community in the future. This poster presents some of the key middleware research issues facing large-scale deployment of high-end collaborative environments such as the Access Grid. The poster will present a future architecture that is heavily dependent on existing infrastructure developed as part of the Globus project including GSI, GASS, and Globus IO, using both the Windows and python based bindings. The poster will introduce the overall architecture for AG 2. 0 including more detailed architecture on each of the following areas, including how the areas fit together with each other and other grid infrastructure that is part of Globus in the Access Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) - Since AG 2. 0 is providing Collaboration Resources to the Grid Computing world, it has been built upon the Globus Toolkit, version 2. 0. This provides all of the resources and services in the Access Grid Toolkit Software with the same level of security as the rest of the Grid. The secure infrastructure allows the Virtual Venues to do strong security both in terms of access control, but also in the dissemination of cryptographic keys that are used to secure the data flowing peer-to-peer among the users. Globus I/O – All connection based communication in AG 2. 0 uses Globus I/O and is therefore secure. Additionally, all nonconnection based communication (used for media streaming) utilizes strong encryption algorithms to keep data private. The encryption keys are distributed via the secure connections to the Virtual Venues. Global Access to Secondary Storage (GASS) – When users share data with each other by either putting a copy of the data in the Virtual Venue or by directly sending the data to another users the data transfer is done via GASS. The User Experience User information – AG 2. 0 adds the notion of users, enabling users to identify other participants in the venue. This identification is the basis for building both public and private interactions in the Access Grid. Users can share data with other participants by dragging a file onto the venues client; the user can choose whether the data is stored in the venue, or carried with the user from venue to venue Workspace Docking – Allowing users to bring data into the Access Grid provides simple instantaneous collaborations with little effort. Workspace Docking also provides the foundation for investigating how to build collaborative applications that can be used through the Virtual Venues. Developers can easily explore building collaborative applications simply by using the Workspace Docking Interface. Coherence – The venues client maintains a view of the Virtual Venue that is guaranteed to be consistent with the other users present. An underlying event system ensures that as users enter and leave the venue, data is added and removed, and other changes take place, the user is kept up to date automatically. Node Management – The Virtual Venue Client provides the ability for users to easily configure Access Grid Nodes. This screen shot of the new user interface shows the features described above. This work was supported by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division subprogram of the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, U. S. Department of Energy, under Contract W-31 -109 -Eng-38 and included partial support under the auspices of the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Initiative.