Globus Toolkit version 4: Software for service-oriented systems

The Globus Toolkit (GT) has been developed since the late 1990s to support the development of service-oriented distributed computing applications and infrastructures. Core GT components address, within a common framework, fundamental issues relating to security, resource access, resource management, data movement, resource discovery, and so forth. These components enable a broader "Globus ecosystem" of tools and components that build on, or interoperate with, GT functionality to provide a wide range of useful application-level functions. These tools have in turn been used to develop a wide range of both "Grid" infrastructures and distributed applications. I summarize here the principal characteristics of the recent Web Services-based GT4 release, which provides significant improvements over previous releases in terms of robustness, performance, usability, documentation, standards compliance, and functionality. I also introduce the new "dev.globus" community development process, which allows a larger community to contribute to the development of Globus software.