gLite is the Middleware of the EGEE project and is based on predecessors like EDG (European Datagrid) and LCG. It integrates tools from Condor and the Globus Toolkit.

The gLite based Infrastructure is used by different communities today mainly by High Energy Physics, Biomed, Earthscience, Fusion and Archeologie.

Glite Grid Middelware Services includes Security Services (Authorization, Authentication, and Auditing), Information & Monitoring Services (Information and Application Monitoring), Data Management (Metadata, File and Replica catalogue, Storage Element, Data Movement) and Workload Management Services (Workloadmanagement, Computing Element, Job Provenance, Packagemanagement).

Maintained By

EGEE Project

License

(Open) EGEE Software Licence

Status

In production in Deisa Grid.

Security

Authentication is based on X.509 PKI infrastructure. Proxies can be delegated to a service that it can act on the users behalf and includes VO information.

Secure service management is done by VOMS.

SLA

Not supported

Data Management

Next to facilitating computational resources sharing, gLite provides the functionality of a full data grid with distributed storage systems. Logical file system and Replica services.

The abstraction layer for disk or storage resources is the SRM

Esp. for Databases an Interface (AMGA) is available.

User Integration

Glite provides a commandline interface and a direct API (Java, C++) to access the system.

On top of this the user communities have built their own comfortable access methods. There are for example different portals like Genius (based on Engineframe) or p-grade (based on Gridsphere).

Core Functionalities

Workflow: Glite provides a Workload management system (WMS) with support of complex workflows (DAG), collection of jobs, parametric and compound jobs. Asynchronous Jobs are integrated in future releases. All these features are supported by a shared input Sandbox.
Brokering: The Resource Broker is part of the Workload management system using the gLite Service Discovery (different plug-ins for BDII and R-GMA are possible). The EGEE Production Services is still using BDII as the information system.
Monitoring: A Logging and Bookkeeping service tracks jobs during their lifetime.
Accounting: Accounting is possible in gLite and accounting data is collected in the production infrastructure.
Steering: Not supported
Interactive access: Not directly supported by gLite. But other EU projects like cross grid combined the middleware with interactivity.
Addressing (WS-Adressing compliant?) gLite consists of a huge number of tools, reengineered from existing projects. A number of these tools are WS-Addressing compliant.
Transactions: Not yet
WS-RF compliant? Most of the gLite tools are working with Webservice Interfaces and the port to WS-RF is an ongoing task.
Charging: Not yet.