The new WS-Resource Framework proposed by the Globus Alliance, IBM, HP and others addresses a number of concerns the Web services community has had with the core OGSI Grid specification, Globus Alliance co-leader Ian Foster said in a presentation at last week's GlobusWorld conference.
The three main concerns, Foster said, are that OGSI places "too much stuff in one specification," doesn't work well with existing Web services tooling, and is too object-oriented.
WSRF addresses those issues by partitioning OGSI v1.0 functionality into "a family of composable specifications," toning down the usage of XML Schema, and making an explicit distinction between the "service" and the stateful "resources" acted upon by that service, Foster said.
WSRF completes the convergence of Grid and Web services, restates OGSI concepts in Web services terms, and WSRF mechanisms will enable the Open Grid Services Architecture, Foster said.
The changes will for the most part be only minor, he said. The "changes are regretted," he said, but the end result could result in much-desired "ubiquity" for Grid services.
"We will work to ease the transition to WSRF," he pledged.
Globus plans a Globus Toolkit 3.2 release in March that will provide continued support for the pre-Web (GT 2.4) components, and "significant improvements" in the stability, usability, and performance of the Web services components based on OGSI, Foster said in an email to Grid services workgroups last week.
The Alliance also plans a GT 4.0 release in the third quarter that builds on the Web services components of GT 3.2 to support WSRF specifications. There will be a high degree of backward compatibility with OGSI, Foster wrote. GT 4.0 will also include all pre-WS components.
"We determined following the July release of OGSI v1.0 that while the mainstream Web services community felt that the OGSI ideas were right on, some refactoring was needed to align with mainstream Web services standards and architecture," Foster wrote. "WSRF does this. The changes are minor - syntactic only, really - but critical for the Web services community. We've been working incredibly hard to work through these issues over the past months, and while it's been exhausting (and frustrating in terms of the closed process that our industrial partners insisted on), I believe that the result is outstanding."
"I know that some are going to be frustrated that these changes have occurred," Foster wrote. "We certainly are, in some sense. However, we are also very excited, because we now have achieved the Grid/Web services convergence that we need to achieve ubiquity for Grid infrastructure. More specifically, we now have the full support of major corporations like IBM and HP (with Microsoft, Sun, and BEA also seeming supportive), which means that WSRF mechanisms will appear in commercial tooling. The reason for this is that the senior architects in these corporations have been convinced that OGSI mechanisms are also needed to create and manage large-scale enterprise computing systems. I believe that we as a community owe a great deal to the people, notably Steve Tuecke, who have achieved this convergence."
According to an FAQ document at globus.org/wsrf, the proposals were drafted outside the Global Grid Forum's OGSI work group because "speed was of critical importance to avoid stalling all ongoing implementation and standardization efforts that depended on OGSI. Second, the development of WSRF specifications demanded expertise, particularly in Web services standards, that was not represented in the OGSI WG."
Other Grid News
In other Grid news, DataSynapse says it has added new features to its GridServer product that go beyond traditional compute-intensive Grids to improve application processing speed, resiliency, scalability and time-to-build and deploy.
"Our next-generation technology, GridServer is unique in its application-centric approach to Grid computing," DataSynapse marketing and strategy SVP Frank Cicio said in a statement. "The ability for infrastructure technology to dynamically adapt to business change while optimizing existing IT investments is of paramount importance to our customers. With GridServer we are able to meet this demand with a flexible, standards-based solution that quickly Grid-enables applications."
Also, HP announced that it will support an operational Grid for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and Enigmatec Corp. named TIBCO co-founder Indra Mohan its new CEO.
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