Open Grid Services Architecture, the Globus-IBM vision for the
convergence of Web services and Grid computing, gained momentum at
Global Grid Forum 5 in Edinburgh last week.
Steve Tuecke of Argonne National Laboratory, the open-source Globus
Project's chief software architect, said there was "strong vendor
turnout" at the Edinburgh meeting, indicating an increase in commercial
interest in Grid computing and Grid services. "GGF is definitely
shifting to have much stronger vendor participation, and OGSA is clearly
at the center of much of that activity," Tuecke said.
At the meeting, Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) working group
members agreed to accelerate development of a Grid Service
Specification, with the goal of completing it by Global Grid Forum 6 in
Chicago in October, Tuecke said. The OGSI working group is charged with
drafting the core infrastructural specifications around which the rest
of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) will be built.
The first of three OGSI working group sessions at GGF5, a general update
on progress and plans for the working group, was attended by more than
300 people, Tuecke said. The other two sessions were technical working
sessions to address some open technical issues in the Grid Service
Specification. The working group agreed to accelerate its activities to
include weekly technical phone calls and a two-day meeting at Argonne
next month for technical discussions.
"Our hope is to have the Grid Service Specification pretty much put to
bed by GGF6 in October," Tuecke said.
"With the major new
draft of the Grid Service Specification that we put out a couple of
weeks ago, we feel we are ready to drop into a tight iteration loop to
nail down the final details in the specification," Tuecke said. "We hope
that by doing so, we can get most of the details of the Grid Service
Specification hammered out shortly after GGF6."
Shortly after the October meeting - assuming that the Grid Service
Specification is complete and the working group approves it by rough
consensus - it will enter the standards-setting Grid Forum's document process as a
candidate for a recommendation track Grid Forum Document. The whole
process can take six months to two years, Tuecke said. "Once sufficient
operational experience is in place, then it can go up for final review
to become a GGF recommendation," he said.
'Everything Is Full Steam Ahead'
There were also several OGSA-related BOFs (birds-of-a-feather) meetings
at GGF5, at which several working groups were proposed. The OGSA Roadmap
BOF, chaired by Globus co-leader Ian Foster and IBM's Jeff Nick,
proposed the creation of three new GGF working groups: one to discuss
and document overall architecture issues and components of OGSA, another
to work on specifications for Java interfaces to the OGSI protocols, and
the third to discuss and document the OGSA security architecture and
roadmap documents that Globus and IBM released the week before GGF5 (see
http://www.globus.org/ogsa) and which build heavily on the IBM-Microsoft
Web services security architecture that was announced in April. There
was "overwhelming support" for establishing the three working groups,
Tuecke said.
Other OGSA-related BOFs proposed a resource modeling working group that
would focus on the use of CIM (Common Information Model) within OGSA, and working groups that would
focus on resource usage records and protocols.
Once a charter and document schedule has been established, a new working
or research group must be approved by the Grid Forum steering group.
Other OGSA-related working groups are already active, such as the OGSA
Database Access and Integration (DAIS) working group, and the GRAAP
(Grid Resource Allocation Agreement Protocol) working group that is
looking at resource management protocols for OGSA.
Also new are two prototype implementations of the Grid Service
Specification (the core OGSI specification on which everything else in
OGSA will be built): an open source Globus Toolkit OGSI Technology
Preview release (available at http://www.globus.org/ogsa), which is a
Java implementation that is tracking the Grid Service specification, and
the Unicore project has demonstration code showing a partial
implementation of OGSI interfacing to Unicore.
Globus also released a fact sheet on the in-development Globus Toolkit 3
(http://www.globus.org/toolkit/gt3-factsheet.html), which gives more
information on how the open source Globus Toolkit - the de facto Grid
computing standard - will evolve to support OGSA.
"Most of these developments are obviously somewhat mundane," Tuecke
said. "But to some extent, I guess that's the point. GGF is ramping up
activities around OGSA with strong vendor support, and the Globus
Project is moving ahead aggressively with an open source implementation
of OGSA. Everything is full steam ahead."
And what began as a Globus-IBM effort has now become much broader, Tuecke said. For example, the UK e-Science program is taking the lead in the database access aspects of OGSA, including leading the DAIS working group efforts. And with the proposed formation of the OGSA Framework working group to discuss and document overall architecture and components of OGSA, "we are hoping to broaden this further, so that it is increasingly not just a Globus-IBM vision, but a consensus vision of most of the Grid community," Tuecke said.
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