Introduction to Globus Online

Lisa Childers
Seminar

Moving large quantities of data across wide area networks can be a painful and laborious process. The Center for Enabling Distributed Petascale Science (CEDPS) project has developed a service called Globus Online that automates this process. Users hand off data transfer tasks (e.g., move a set of files, mirror a directory) to the hosted Globus Online service, which then does its best to ensure that the transfer completes successfully, monitoring performance and errors, correcting problems automatically whenever possible, and reporting back on status and errors. Thus, we eliminate the need to babysit transfers, freeing users to focus on domain-specific work. This lecture includes an overview of the motivation for Globus Online, a discussion of key design concepts, and a demonstration of current capabilities.