SI2-SSI: Sustaining Globus Toolkit for the NSF Community (Sustain-GT)

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Science and engineering depend increasingly on the ability to collaborate and federate resources across distances. This observation holds whether a single investigator is accessing a remote computer, a small team is analyzing data from an engineering experiment, or an international collaboration is involved in a multi-decade project such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Any distributed collaboration and resource federation system requires methods for authentication and authorization, data movement, and remote computation. Of the many solutions that have been proposed to these problems, the Globus Toolkit (GT) has proven the most persistently applicable across multiple fields, geographies, and project scales. GT resource gateway services and client libraries are used by tens of thousands of people every day to perform literally tens of millions of tasks at thousands of sites, enabling discovery across essentially every science and engineering discipline supported by the NSF. As new, innovative techniques and technologies for collaboration and scientific workflows are developed, and as new computing and instrument resources are added to the national cyberinfrastructure, these technologies and other improvements must be added and integrated into GT so that it can continue to provide an advanced and robust technology for solving scientific research problems.The Sustain-GT project builds on past success to ensure that GT resource gateway services will continue to meet the challenges faced by NSF science and engineering communities. These challenges include: multiple-orders-of-magnitude increases in the volume of data generated, stored, and transmitted; much bigger computer systems and correspondingly larger and more complex computations; much faster networks; many more researchers, educators, and students engaged in data-intensive and computational research; and rapidly evolving commodity Web and Cloud computing environments. With the help of a new User Requirements Board, Sustain-GT will respond to community demands to evolve the GT resource gateway services with superior functionality, scalability, availability, reliability, and manageability. Sustain-GT will also provide the NSF community with high quality support and rapid-response bug fix services, as is required to sustain a heavily used, production system like GT.