Based upon the Internet FTP protocol, GridFTP is a high-performance, secure, reliable data transfer protocol optimized for high-bandwidth wide-area networks.
Getting Started
You will need a valid proxy certificate in order to use GridFTP (you might think of it as 'logging in to Globus'). See our instructions for using globus. Once grid-proxy-info shows that you have a proxy certificate, you may start using GridFTP
Using GridFTP
The first client that NICS supports for GridFTP is globus-url-copy. The URL for the NICS GridFTP is gridftp.nics.teragrid.org. A listing of other GridFTP servers around the teragrid can be found here.
**Important** Do not forget to load the globus module before using it.
load module globus
For example, to copy everything in Joe's directory on a Lustre file system to the corresponding directory on the XT5, use the following command:
% globus-url-copy -r \
gsiftp://gridftp-co.ncsa.teragrid.org:2811/joe/ \
gsiftp://gridftp.nics.teragrid.org/lustre/scratch/joe/
Note that the tailing forward slashes are required for directories. If the -r (recursive) is omitted and a directory is being transferred, the files in that directory will be transferred, but not the files in subdirectories.
You may also use GridFTP via uberftp, either one-liners or interactively. The syntax of uberftp is very similar to sftp, see man uberftp.
