What is the difference between Legion and Globus?
Legion and Globus are both distributed high-performance metacomputing systems that aim to find ways to make metacomputing easier, faster, and more accessible to programmers and users. Since both are addressing the same problem, there are some similar design features. There is, however, an important and fundamental system-level difference in architecture and design principles. Globus can be characterized as a “sum of services” architecture, while Legion is an integrated architecture. Globus uses sets of pre-existing components that are grouped into composite toolkits. For example, there are services for scheduling, authentication, and remote job spawning. As designers add a new piece of functionality to Globus, they design an interface for that piece. There is no underlying common architecture. In contrast, Legion builds its higher level structure on top of a single unified object model. When designers wish to add new parts they need only plug their new objects into the common programmi
