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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
IAN FOSTER ON GLOBUS: WHAT WILL
COME
One of the co-creators of the Globus Toolkit, Ian Foster from Argonne
National
Laboratory, provided one of the keynotes on "Globus and the Grid: State of the
Union" for some 450 attendees at this week's GlobusWORLD 2004 conference. The
title alluded to the fact that President Bush had provided the State of the
Union address to the nation just the night before.
Foster began and concluded his remarks with reference to Globus as a
"balancing act" between addressing short-term needs (software engineering and
development plus supporting user needs) and long-term needs (pushing
development of standards, conducting research and keeping the project on the
"bleeding edge").
"Globus must be a research and a development organization," he said.
Accomplishments of 2003 included progress on standards, software
development
and development of solutions in particular applications domains. With regard
to standards, given Globus' goal of defining a service-oriented architecture,
progress was made in addressing vital Grid requirements and building Web
Services standards (a major focus for the last two years), which is leading
toward establishment of an Open Grid Services Architecture. The OGSA, he
admitted, is a work in progress, but it's moving forward rapidly.
Further, he acknowledged an important "bump in the road": Moving the Open
Grid
Services Infrastructure (defined last June and implemented in the Globus
Toolkit) toward the Web Services Resource Framework. Foster said that the
Globus community has been pivotal in moving the Grid community to Web
services, in particular by identifying "state" as critical missing piece in
the OGSI.
However, the OGSI was developed largely outside the Web Services community.
The resulting pushback from that community compromised Globus' goal of
ubiquity but it did serve the purpose of engaging them to resolve the
problems, which, in turn, led to development of the Web Services Resource
Framework.
Probably the biggest news at the conference, in fact, was an announcement
by
the Globus Alliance, IBM and HP on details of the new WS-Resource Framework, a
further convergence of Grid services and Web Services.
"So the convergence between the Grid and Web Services can be considered
completed," said Foster delightedly.
Several specifications have been finalized. As examples, Foster pointed to
OGSI 1.0, x.509 proxy certification and GridFTP. And, he said, "We are leading
[in the Global Grid Forum] data access and integration, WS-agreement, and
replica location efforts."
With respect to software development, Globus efforts have taken care of the
existing user base, providing multiple 2.x releases to address user needs,
continued support for pre-WS code, and numerous new features and improvements.
In addition, they have introduced leading-edge technologies: The 3.0 release
supports the Open Grid Services Infrastructure, a first attempt to link Grid
and Web Services, and other new services, such a Reliable File Transfer and
Replica Location Service. Community interest remains strong: Since the release
of v2.4 in April last year, the Globus Web site has experienced more than
10,000 downloads per month.
Globus partners are creating strong GT-based Grid solutions, including the
Virtual Data Toolkit, Platform Globus, the NSF Middleware Initiative
distribution, the Butterfly Grid, the IBM Grid Toolkit, the Access Grid, the
Earth System Grid, the BIRN Biomedical Grid (led by Cal-(IT)² DeGEM
participant Mark Ellisman), the TeraGrid and the UK eScience Grid.
Examples of production Grid deployments include Grid2003 by the U.S.
physics
community to create a persistent U.S. Open Science Grid, which was stood up at
SC2003 and is still operational. A second example is the NEESGrid, a
multi-site Grid to support distributed earthquake engineering research.
The "community" includes the Globus Alliance, which "lives and breaths GT,"
according to Foster; academic affiliates and users who are major contributors
to GT technologies; the Global Grid Forum, a locus for many standards
activities; and vendor and user companies. Foster emphasized that the GT is
very much a community effort, supported broadly by academic research labs,
supercomputer centers and the national labs, and, increasingly, industry.
Then Foster turned to the Grid vision, defining the Grid as something that
"coordinates distributed resources using standard, open, general-purpose
protocols and interfaces to deliver required qualities of service" (also
becoming known as "qualities of experience"). As part of this discussion, he
referred attendees to the 2nd edition of The Grid, called The Grid 2:
Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, which he and Kesselman edited.
This book was published in November 2003.
The Grid of the future, Foster said, will be a capability-rich environment
that adapts easily to changing requirements. Routine, ubiquitous and
predictable, its services will provide the advanced capabilities needed to
meet user requirements and user quality of experience needs.
However, he pointed to integration and management as fundamental
challenges.
The Grid will consist of many sources of data, services, and computation.
Registries will organize services of interest. The services are likely to be
found at many locations. And exploration and analysis may involve complex,
multi-step workflows.
So the definition of the Grid implies that we must be able to describe
resources in uniform ways, govern the behavior of resources that are not under
our control and/or are oversubscribed, and exploit commonality across
resources so as to reduce the complexity of integration.
The Grid also needs uniform resource management, a "primary driver of our
work
over last five years," Foster said. "We need a ubiquitous, uniform base for
modeling and managing resources, and we are now well positioned to model and
manage an increasingly rich resource set and their lifetime functions."
All interesting interactions on the Grid in the future, Foster envisioned,
will be based on previously negotiated agreements between requestors and
services (with encoded, negotiated quality of experience). The challenge will
be to establish the framework so that agreements can be established in an
oversubscribed environment; transformed, composed, and decomposed; managed
like any other resource; and evolved as a result of faults. "Web Services
Agreement," Foster said, "is the next step on this path."
The community also needs to identify and factor in commonalities across a
broad range of applications and resources. Effort should be expended on task
management (jobs, data transfers, workflows), data movement (files, database
replication), registries (discovery, metadata, assertions), and faults and
management (applications, computers, networks).
Goals for 2004 include stabilizing the infrastructure around WSRF in terms
of
usability, performance, reliability, scalability, documentation and
"internationalization where users' first language is not English." Globus
developers must also realize new functionality in the pipeline, such as data
access and integration/metadata management, enhanced GridFTP, a community
scheduling framework, and monitoring and discovery frameworks. They should
also expand the set of solution providers and increase engagement with the
corporate community.
Users should anticipate the release of GT v3.2 in a couple of months. V4.0
(Beta) is expected in Q204, the production version in Q304 (WSRF and some new
functionality), and v.4.2 (Beta) early next year. GT v3.2 will include many
bug fixes; usability improvements; improvements to Grid FTP, RFT, RLS, and
GRAM; a "preview" of OGSA data access and integration; an optimized core'
eXtensible IO (XIO); and security.
V4.0 will implement the draft WSRF specifications, preserving the OGSI
client
and service APIs as much as possible and all pre-Web-Service components.
For more on the conference, see www.globusworld.org.
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