Software and services are co-ordinated among TeraGrid's nine resource provider organisations to share common definitions and implementations throughout the TeraGrid community. This provides commonality for the most critical HPC capabilities such as remote login, moving data between systems, and application development. Each resource supports a subset of CTSS capabilities based on its architecture and intended applications.

TeraGrid's CTSS documentation is now available as a dynamic catalog offering the ability to browse the CTSS capabilities available on each of TeraGrid's resources. As in the TeraGrid Resource Catalogue and the TeraGrid HPC 3rd-party Software Repository, users may browse or search the CTSS Catalog according to their needs:

• View the availability of all CTSS software and services on one or more resource providers
• Find the machines that contain the specific software or services that a user needs
• Discover TeraGrid resources that satisfy typical user scenarios
• Find software, then drill down from the catalogue results to software-specific documentation

The user scenario feature allows users who are unfamiliar with TeraGrid to identify appropriate resources and software tools based on a brief description of what they need to do. For example, one can now find all of the TeraGrid resources that provide the ability to "automatically run and manage a set of co-ordinated tasks" or "automate the movement of a large number of files between TeraGrid systems". Links to relevant documentation help users learn how to use each capability. Local software and service configuration details allow users to configure their applications to use these capabilities on each TeraGrid system.

Documentation has been added for a number of new and emerging CTSS capabilities, including TeraGrid's single sign-on capability and the ability to automate the execution of large ensemble runs. These updates clarify the coordinated capabilities offered by TeraGrid resources and provide a clearer view of where each capability is available across the many TeraGrid resources.

Since CTSS 3 was announced in June 2006, a series of software and service updates have kept TeraGrid capabilities at the cutting edge of high-performance computing environments. These updates have been made throughout the year, updating components as needed to address issues reported by users or to add new features as they became available. Specific improvements have included upgrades to gx-map, softenv, tgusage, and GridFTP software, improvements to the WS GRAM remote job submission service, and the addition of new system monitoring and information publishing services.

Information services is an area where TeraGrid's software capabilities have expanded greatly. TeraGrid is an open system: it uses open standards to implement service interfaces and network protocols, and these interfaces and protocols are documented so that others may build interesting capabilities using the TeraGrid infrastructure. TeraGrid's service interfaces make heavy use of Web service standards, and TeraGrid now offers a Web service-based information publishing capability where key details about TeraGrid's software, services, and system status are published.

The information service describes CTSS software and services, including service hostnames and endpoint information, software availability and details about how to access each software package on each system, and the current status of the job queues on each TeraGrid compute system. TeraGrid's User Portal uses this service to display queue status data for users who are planning their job submissions. The service also provides a key building block for future metascheduling/co-scheduling services. It also enables the documentation Web site to provide up-to- the-minute information about CTSS availability on TeraGrid resources. The service also drives TeraGrid's automated verification and validation system.