Special Section: GGF12 In Review:
GGF12 MARKS SHIFT TOWARD ENTERPRISE GRIDS
By Alan J.
Weissberger, Contributing Editor
I. Here are the GGF12 highlights, from a business perspective:
- Companies from pharmaceutical, financial/investment,
aerospace, chip design, automotive, etc. all gave presentations on their
experience with Grids as well as key issues that need to be resolved in the
future.
- The EGA (Enterprise Grid Alliance) presented its
objectives, working groups and phases during the standards panel session. EGA
has five Working Groups: Reference Model, Component Provisioning, Data
Provisioning, Grid Security, Utility Accounting. They all work in phases and
they will cooperate with GGF, as well as the DMTF (Distributed Management Task
Force).
- BT has announced its intent to offer one stop shopping
for
Grid outsourcing services (including planning, design and maintenance of
Grids) to European corporations. They refer to this initiative as "Grid
Enabled Assured Application Infrastructure (or AAI)." BT has a non-exclusive
partnership with HP to realize this vision. They will likely have other
partners. BT will use their 21st Century Network (see links below) as the
underlying network infrastructure for Grid Enabled AAI. BT already has
customers for non-Grid AAI -- which uses today's MPLS VPN technology to
support business process outsourcing.
The BT 21st Century Network to interconnect Grid sites will be an extension
of
the VPN service they now offer (MPLS+). BT will define their own SLAs/SLOs and
monitor them for their customers. They believe their customers will trust BT
to do this accurately and unbiased (vs. an independent third party that might
assess penalties for non compliance of SLAs/SLOs).
Opinion: This is very significant in that multi-site Grids are not scalable
(and would be too expensive to deploy) if all interconnections were done by
point to point private lines.
A press link for BTs 21st Century Network:
www.btplc.com/News/Pressreleasesandarticles/Corporatenewsreleases/2004/nr0445.htm
BT is now trialing the network:
www.btplc.com/News/Pressreleasesandarticles/Corporatenewsreleases/2004/nr0444.htm
The rollout is between now and 2008-9. Here are some additional links:
www.btplc.com/News/Presentations/Industryanalystspresentations/21stCenturyNetwork.htm
news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/broadband/0,39020342,39157147,00.htm
- GGF Enterprise Grid Requirements (EGR) RG has a very ambitious plan to
assemble Use Cases and Requirements/Profiles for enterprise Grids. Intel seems
to be leading the effort. EGR RG is chaired by Toshi Nakata of NEC Research in
Japan and Germany. During the first RG session, it was noted that contemporary
departmental Grids don't scale well when they are expanded to cover the entire
enterprise. EGR RG is the only GGF WG/RG that will be considering requirements
for such scalability. They plan to rapidly develop a complete set of
requirements for EGs and follow that up with a requirements analysis to
identify patterns in the use cases.
- GGF has a new chair -- Mark Linesch from HP -- who seems to be much more
focused on business Grids and deployment issues (vs. academic/scientific Grids
that previous chair Charlie Catlett was concerned with due to his leadership
role in Tera Grid project. Linesch stated that GGF will be taking Grids to the
next phase: broad acceptance within industry with pervasive adoption. This
will require more concrete specs for OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture)
and Web Services (being standardized by W3C and OASIS TCs).
"Our goal is to provide the standards for distributed scientific and business
computing. The economic advantages for enterprise computing should then be
well evident."
Opinion: Expect Mark to be more proactive in working with other standards
bodies and commercial users of Grids.
- GGF NMA (Network Measurements for Applications) RG will be relevant to
adaptive apps that want to use network measurements to alter their attributes
and improve performance, e.g. bandwidth, delay, and jitter measurements could
be used to improve video quality or file transfer sizes. NMA RG also wants to
use existing measurements to predict network performance (depending on network
type).
II. Commercial Users Experience With Grids
A. Highlights of keynote speech by Novartis:
- Need to distinguish between various types of Grids: number crunching, data
transfer, information knowledge, people-network access.
- Clarity in concepts will help focus projects and provide concrete
deliverables.
- All elements of the Grid can be part of a single multi-tiered and coherent
strategic framework.
- Grids will not be perfect for some time, so we must manage our
expectations. Prototypes are emerging; improvements and optimization are
essential; maturity will follow.
- Grids present a new paradigm for doing drug discovery. Leadership,
transcendence, entrepreneurship and tenacity are the essence of
transformation.
Benefit of Grids to Novartis:
- integrate information in a seamless manner.
0
- navigate across entire knowledge space.
- find new drug targets, new compounds to be used for new drugs. (discovery)
- drastically reduces time to get results, e.g. hi throughput docking
experiments now done in one day on a Grid vs weeks before Grids were used.
- Grid open issues (to be resolved): software licensing practices, security,
true utility computing, resource virtualization, network QOS and SLAs.
- We must think "outside the box" to be successful in Grid deployment. We
need to change basic processes.
B. Wachovia Bank's Experience with Grids (Keynote Address):
- Experienced a tenfold increase in compute speed at 20 percent of projected
cost.
- 250 computers are now on the original Wachovia Grid.
- 500 computers will be on a different Wachovia Grid by end of 2004.
- Technical impediments/barriers to Grid adoption: transaction speed,
maintaining data state information across the Grid, security, accounting,
performance monitoring and SLA compliance, implementation of standards.
- Cultural issues that have slowed full adoption of Grids: acceptance of a
new technology, loss of control, accountability, not knowing who pays (lack of
automated accounting tools).
III. Grid ROI Panel: JP Morgan, IBM, 451 Group, Philips Research
A. JP Morgan:
- Risk management apps running on high performance Grid.
- Joint venture with Platform Computing.
- 72 CPU cluster in production Grid.
- Departmental Grids in United States and United Kingdom.
- Goal: enterprise Grid connecting all sites.
- Does not care about use of Web Services; only cares about what works and
provides high performance.
- Key challenge: business model, especially departmental charging aspects.
- Key issue: accounting/charging for a CPU that has been reprovisioned for a
different department.
B. IBM:
- IBM has a tool which facilitates user evaluation of Grids- Grid Capacity
Planner. It identifies apps that are suitable for running on a Grid. Then it
looks at proposed infrastructure to determine if it can support the necessary
workload.
- Cost is a huge Grid deployment issue: cost of hardware, middleware, and
maintenance costs. Compare these costs to the cost of solving the problem in
another way, e.g. buying more hardware/ compute power.
- Limiting factors for Grid deployments: manageability, latency, total cost
of ownership.
C. 451 Group: Emerging Technologies for Enterprise Grids:
- Martin McCarthy referred to the report his organization provided to all
GGF12 registrants. He sited several examples, documented in the report.
D. Philips:
- Developed an in house load balancing tools to schedule resource utilization
(IBM also has such tools).
- Philips has 12 years of using "compute farms," so had sufficient experience
to be ready for Grids.
- Now investigating interconnection of Grids across Philip's private WAN.
- Need better performance monitoring tools to determine utilization and
accounting.
- Along with other panelists, feels that we need richer functionalities and
consistent implementation of specifications/standards before Grid resources
can be truly virtualized-especially across a WAN.
IV. Standards Panel: Mark Linesch of HP (GGF Chair) And Bernd Kosch of
Fujitsu-Siemens (European EGA Director)
A. Mark's talk (about business models and practices rather then on Grid
standards):
- We need to improve the linkage between business and IT.
- Respond quickly to changing business opportunities and threats.
- Lower costs by improving response time and (computer) utilization.
- Take individual fabric and virtualization approach to data center:
- consolidate data center resources.
- decouple business processes from dedicated compute/ IT resources.
- Goal: create a fungible pool of resources to be allocated on demand.
- Need to simplify IT processes, retrain people, create new financial models
to take advantage of Grid technology.
- Scientific and technical Grids provide the foundation for Grid computing.
- See early deployment of commercial and enterprise Grids happening in 2004.
- Momentum building, proven, more pervasive and lower cost Grid solutions
occurring in 2005-2006.
- Broad adoption in 2007-2008 time frame.
- Standards create the glue (that provides completeness) and grease (which
makes for pervasiveness).
- Grid standards should provide: richer and more comprehensive solution
stacks, longer life cycles for apps, better utilization and more automation,
more choice with greater availability and lower cost, stability to invest with
industry leverage.
- Standards will drive down administrative costs.
- OGSA provides the blueprint- framework for creating, managing and
delivering interoperable Grid services.
- GGF has published OGSA v1.0 Informational document, OGSA use case document,
and OGSA glossary.
B. Bernard: All about the EGA:
- EGA focus is Grid computing in data centers (not desktop Grids).
- Three phases of EGA work:
- Core capability- business apps within a single enterprise Grid
infrastructure (2005).
- Include support for technical Grids; expand to multiple inter-
connected data centers and between enterprises (2005-06).
- Unify and complete set of deliverables for utility computing
(2006-2007).
- EGA has five WGs, each with a tactical focus to achieve their goals within
a six month timeline. The five EGA WGs: Reference Model, Component
Provisioning, Data Provisioning, Grid Security, Utility Accounting. All are
now pursuing phase one of the EGAs work plan (business apps within a single
enterprise Grid infrastructure).
- EGA plans to have a solid working relationship with GGF:
- EGA will contribute use cases to GGF.
- EGA will provide feedback on OGSA specs.
- EGA now has created Japan and Europe steering committees.
- EGA's charter: The technical scope of the EGA is Grid computing. This scope
includes Grid activities within enterprise data centers, but not desktop
Grids; using proven and standard enterprise components, but not vector
supercomputers; within and between trusted and secure enterprises, but not
involving dynamically defined virtual organizations, and for use with
enterprise commercial and technical applications, but not scientific computing
or academic research Grids.
About Alan J. Weissberger
As the founder and Technical Director of Data Communications Technology (DCT),
a technical consulting firm started in March 1983, Alan J Weissberger
specializes in telecommunications standards and their implementation. His
clients have included network providers (AT&T, NTT, Pacific Bell, US West,
Entel and CTC in Chile, Telkom South Africa, Moroccan PTT, others), equipment
and semiconductor manufacturers, and large end users. In 1995 and 1996 Alan
was the principal architect for the European Commission’s multi-service,
multi-country ATM network –- the largest private network in Europe (that
network has now evolved into Gig Ethernet over CWDM). In 2000-01, he was
Ciena's lead ITU-T delegate, contributing to the standardization of the
optical control plane in SG13 and SG15. Alan now represents NEC Corp in
several OASIS TCs dealing with Web Services, while also attending the Global
Grid Forum and the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF).
Weissberger can be reached via e-mail at aweissberger@sbcglobal.net or
ajwdct@technologist.com. To read his entire biography, please click here.
|
