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

2. 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
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3. 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?
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4. 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
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5. 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
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6. 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.
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7. 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
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8. 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
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9. 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
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10. 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).
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11. 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)
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12. 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, …
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13. 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 (Register)
Feedback welcomed
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