The Globus Toolkit is "useful stuff now, but it's not at a point where
it should be a ubiquitous standard," according to Argonne National
Laboratory Lead Software Architect Steve Tuecke, who spoke at the first
Grid Computing Planet Conference & Expo in San Jose last week.
With that in mind, the open source Globus Project and IBM developed the
Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) protocols, "the vision and
implementation for moving toward" a ubiquitous standard for Grid
middleware, Tuecke said.
The Globus-IBM collaboration began last year when IBM officials realized
that they were working on many of the same problems as Globus. OGSA will
be implemented in the Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3), which will be released in
alpha form by the end of the year, Tuecke said.
Tuecke, who developed the first Globus code seven years ago, gave
conference attendees an overview of OGSA, a vision for the convergence
of Grid computing with Web services.
OGSA has a service orientation, Tuecke said. All entities are defined by
interface and behavior, so resources and programs are treated in the
same way and virtualization is easy to achieve, he said. WSDL is at the
core of OGSA, whose goal is to manage persistent services as well as
transient service instances that are created and destroyed dynamically,
such as video conferencing or distributed data analysis.
Andrew Grimshaw of Avaki, one of several Grid companies to endorse the
OGSA vision, told attendees that "having an architecture that everyone
can agree on is very important." Andrew Chien of Entropia said standards
will accelerate availability and deployment of Grids, and ensure
interoperability among solutions from different vendors.
The standards-setting Global Grid Forum is working on OGSA and Avaki's
proposed naming and binding protocol, the Secure Grid Naming Protocol
(SGNP), in the Open Grid Services Infrastructure working group.
Grimshaw said the Grid Forum doesn't require that source code be
completely open, only that it be made available in a "non-discriminatory
way." He and others are trying to change that, he said, and Avaki has
made SGNP completely open.
Tuecke said that Web services is still evolving, so there is "a lot that
is still ill-defined" that could affect Grid services. "Basing Grid
services on Web services, which is itself still evolving, is definitely
going to lead to some heartburn before this is over," Tuecke said.
Also at the conference, Stephen Scott of Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(ORNL) discussed the latest in cluster tools. Clusters are typically
small nodes in a Grid, which brings clusters together to form a virtual
supercomputer. ORNL offers OSCAR-based Cluster Power tools. Unlimited
Scale will soon commercialize Sandia's C Plant software, and Scyld
Beowulf is another commercial offering. PBM works in heterogeneous
systems, but MPI won't work for heterogeneous systems until MPI 2 is
released, he said.
Chris Worley of Linux NetworX described his own company's cluster
products, including Oracle-certified cluster architecture.
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