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09/14/2006, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Speaker:
Ravi Madduri, Technology Coordinator and Primary Developer, Argonne National Lab.
While globus-url-copy and GridFTP in general are a very powerful set of tools, there are characteristics which may not always be optimal. First, the GridFTP protocol is not a web service protocol (it does not employ SOAP, WSDL, etc). Second, GridFTP requires that the client maintain an open socket connection to the server throughout the transfer. For long transfers this may not be convenient, such as if running from your laptop. While globus-url-copy uses the robustness features of GridFTP to recover from remote failures (network outages, server failures, etc), a failure of the client or the client's host means that recovery is not possible since the information needed for recovery is held in the client's memory. What is needed to address these issues is a service interface based on web services protocols that persists the transfer state in reliable storage. We provide such a service and call it the Reliable File Transfer (RFT) service.
RFT is a Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) compliant web service that provides "job scheduler"-like functionality for data movement. You simply provide a list of source and destination URLs (including directories or file globs) and then the service writes your job description into a database and then moves the files on your behalf. Once the service has taken your job request, interactions with it are similar to any job scheduler. Service methods are provided for querying the transfer status, or you may use standard WSRF tools (also provided in the Globus Toolkit) to subscribe for notifications of state change events. We provide the service implementation which is installed in a web services container (like all web services) and a very simple client.
This session will focus on different scenarios as to how one can use RFT for data management needs. Attendees should have prior knowledge of RFT.
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