Grid FTP

Grid FTP

GridFTP is an extension of the standard File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for use with Grid computing. It is defined as part of the Globus toolkit, under the organisation of the Global Grid Forum (specifically, by the GridFTP working group).

The aim of GridFTP is to provide a more reliable and high performance file transfer for Grid computing applications. This is necessary because of the increased demands of transmitting data in Grid computing - it is frequently necessary to transmit very large files, and this needs to be done fast and reliably.

GridFTP is the answer to the problem of incompatibility between storage and access systems. Previously, each data provider would make their data available in their own specific way, providing a library of access functions. This made it difficult to obtain data from multiple sources, requiring a different access method for each, and thus dividing the total available data into partitions. GridFTP provides a uniform way of accessing the data, encompassing functions from all the different modes of access, building on and extending the universally accepted FTP standard. FTP was chosen as a basis for it because of its widespread use, and because it has a well defined architecture for extensions to the protocol (which may be dynamically discovered).