1. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review GridLab WP10 Information Services Massimo Cafaro massimo.cafaro@unile.it CACT/ISUFI University of Lecce, Italy

2. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Information Services High performance execution in Grid environments requires access to accurate, up-to-date information Manual or default configuration hinders application performance Making the relevant information available is nontrivial because information can be diverse in scope dynamic in value distributed across the net

3. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Information Services We need efficient, scalable access to diverse, dynamic, and distributed information about the structure and state of grid resources Basis for grid-aware apps (self adjusting & adaptive)

4. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Role of GridLab WP 10 Our WP aims to provide the GridLab Information Services needed for a wide range of grid computing scenarios, taking into account: Performance Scalability Security Uniformity Expressiveness Extensibility Multiple sources Dynamic data Flexible access Deployability Decentralized control

5. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review WP 10 Activities WP 10 is extending the Globus Toolkit GIS We begun with an analysis of Globus Toolkit GIS A Comparison of GIS capabilities and GridLab dynamic grid computing requirements led us to: Specification of information model Security mechanisms & policies Development of extended GIS Development of high-level APIs

6. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review GIS Architecture AA Customized Aggregate Directories R Standard Resource Description Services Soft State Registration Protocol Users Data Registration WS R R User’s read/write request Data Lookup

7. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Main features I GridLab information schema based on LDAP new information providers for information related to Services; Web Services; Software; Users; Firewalls; Virtual Organizations; Certification Authorities; Clusters; new method to properly configure LDAP server to reduce the response time using caching mechanisms

8. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Main features II The release also includes a web service and related clients, to publish and retrieve information stored in the MDS. Main features are: GSI enabled plug-in for the gSOAP Toolkit support for authentication/authorization mechanisms based on globus GSI; support for service or web service register, unregister and discovery; extension of allowed character set according to the RFC 1738; support for handling of information related to software, virtual organization, firewalls; support for arbitrary queries on LDAP server. Automatic platform detection and configuration of the software package; support for all of the GridLab testbed platforms

9. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Novelty Even though other projects have worked on extensions to the Globus GIS, our system is the only that allows users: To store information, performing GSI authentication/authorization Accessible through web services

10. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Progress made since last review I we refined the design and development of the second release of the GridLab MDS web service according to GridLab partners feedback we provided a better installation procedure The information provider to obtain information about web services has been developed again to match the new information schema for web services; it also supports the registration of multiple instances of the same web service as requested we have also continued the development of our GSI plug-in for gSOAP, by simplifying and improving the installation procedure we ported the software we have developed to other platforms belonging to the GridLab testbed: linux, Tru64 and IRIX

11. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Progress made since last review II We released an alpha, a beta and the final, 2.0. version of the GridLab MDS The information provider to obtain information about web services has been improved to match the new information schema for web services The 2.0 release now supports the registration of web services or instances of them running on nodes belonging to a single domain into a “front-end” node (where, at least, a GRIS server must be active) This release includes also a module for efficiently managing an extended character set to allow the registration of URLs

12. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Issues After two years of active development, the GridLab GIS has not yet been integrated/used by the other partners, despite being delivered always on time respecting all of the milestones and for all of the GridLab testbed platforms To overcome the problem, we are willing to collaborate with our partners in order to deploy the software and to train them, if needed. We are also willing to help our partners developing their software (GIS integration)

13. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review Dissemination activities Published paper: G. Aloisio, M. Cafaro, I. Epicoco, D. Lezzi, M. Mirto, S. Mocavero, "The Design and Implementation of the GridLab Information Service", to appear in Proceedings of The Second International Workshop on Grid and Cooperative Computing (GCC 2003), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer- Verlag

14. Massimo Cafaro GridLab Review 2004 Roadmap Evolution of our GSI plug-in for gSOAP Integration of WP6 authorization service Evolution of GridLab GIS Development of high-level APIs to retrieve information Analysis of new GT4 WS-RF based information services (to appear late fall 2004) ?