The Globus Consortium, an alliance of grid computing companies and experts in academia, has released its latest open source toolkit for grid computing.

Globus Toolkit 4 adds web services standards, support for Security Markup Language and Extensible Access Control Markup Language and other new security and authorisation features. It is available for download under a public licence.

"The leading enterprise grid vendors and standards bodies are standing behind Globus Toolkit 4 as the preferred open source software for enterprise grids," said Globus Consortium board member Ian Foster.

"By building grids with the Globus Toolkit, and by working with vendors that support the Globus Toolkit, organisations can best position themselves to exploit the full potential of enterprise grids."

Most major manufacturers, including IBM, HP, Intel, Novell and Sun Microsystems, are now lined up behind the Globus standard.