Grid Systems: What do we need from web service standards? Steven Newhouse Deputy Director, OMII

Need two forms of standards Infrastructure (e.g. WS, WS-I+, WS-RF, …) Defining a service interface (or contract) Naming service endpoints Supporting services: Notification & Messaging User Oriented (e.g. OGSA, …) Invoke an application on a remote resource Move data from point A to B Find a service to do X 30/04/2019 ©

So why do we need standards? UK in the middle of a five year & £250M programme 100+ projects across all disciplines Engineering, Medical, Environmental, Astrophysics, … Initial projects coming to an end… How are their outputs taken forward? New projects starting up… What technology should they use? Migrating from research to production… What technology will provide a robust & stable infrastructure? 30/04/2019 ©

Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute The source of open source grid software Based at the University of Southampton Utilise existing software and standards Production focused software development Integrate, test & document ‘a product’ Reduce the time spent by applied researchers at having to be computer scientists 30/04/2019 ©

Are Grid Services different from Web Services? In many cases they are not! Expose capability to others Conclusion: Leverage existing WS infrastructure However they can be… Potentially long running stateful response Complex & dynamic authorisation rules Workflows requiring delegated authority Require dynamic third party interactions Conclusion: Extend infrastructure as required 30/04/2019 ©

Web Service Grids: WS-I+ Baseline from WS-I profiles Specifications that are very low risk: Completed standardisation process (stable) Growing community adoption Interoperable commercial implementations (tooling) WS-I track specifications Specifications added to profile as they mature e.g. WS-RF This not a static set it will evolve over time. 30/04/2019 ©

WS-I+ : Current Status Core Architecture: WS-I (XSD, SOAP, WSDL) Discovery UDDI (examining the role of Semantic meta-data & RGMA) Workflow BPEL Messaging WS-RM (Minimal differences from WS-R) Addressing WS-A (Now W3C activity in this area with WS-Message Delivery) Notification: No clear solution 30/04/2019 ©

Listening to the Users (with Jennifer M Schopf, ANL) Training and education, esp. security Delegation for web services Job tracking & data movement Dependable builds Wrappers for usability Composability of functionality Verification and instability analysis User-oriented diagnosis tools 30/04/2019 ©

OMII_1 Distribution Consists of: Plus installers & documentation Base (Tomcat 5.1 & Axis 1.2) Extensions (Axis Handlers) WS-Security Process Based Access Control Basic Services Sample application Plus installers & documentation Nov 2004: Public release candidate 30/04/2019 ©

OMII_1:Basic File-Compute Grid Based on a group of four services Management: Account and Resources must have an account with a service provider or delegated access to someone else’s account allocate cluster capacity charged to the account Functional: Data & Application execution running pre-installed applications (jobs) storing input and output data files can peer services from different providers Allocation is designed to allow service providers to manage capacity. No reservation as most cluster managers don’t support guaranteed start times. (But see GEMSS, which uses the COSY cluster manager which does). 30/04/2019 ©

Investing in the Grid Community GridSAM (Job Submission & Monitoring service) BPEL (Workflow service) Grimoires (Registry service based on UDDI) FIRMS (Reliable messaging) FINS (Notification) GeodiseLab (Matlab toolbox) WSRF::Lite integration OGSA-DAI (Database service) WSeSS (Using SSH to tunnel requests to resources) 30/04/2019 ©

Where do we go from here? Need to be user driven Deliver user functionality with established need Factor out commonality where it develops, standardise and compose back into services Need to standardise when there is consensus Global Grid Forum: Application & User space OASIS/W3C/DMTF: Infrastructure Need to validate assumptions by experiment Deploy, test, refine, deploy, test, refine, … 30/04/2019 ©

Summary Need to evolve infrastructure by factoring out commonalities in user facing services OMII releases All open source software (BSD, Apache, LGPL) OMII 1.0: December 2004 OMII 1.1: January 2005 OMII 2.0: April 2005 Download http://www.omii.ac.uk (Register) Feedback welcomed 30/04/2019 ©