An important standard that will help applications work with distributed
systems could be ready in draft form by Global Grid Forum 6 in Chicago
in October.
"We're continuing to make good progress toward a specification, and hope
to have a first draft at GGF6," said John Tollefsrud, Sun ONE Grid
Marketing Manager and co-chair of the Grid Forum's Distributed Resource
Management Application API (DRMAA) working group.
Getting applications to work in a Grid environment is one of the biggest
challenges that Grid technology faces. Applications not developed for
Grid must currently be rewritten in parallel to work in a Grid
environment, although some commercial vendors claim success in porting
applications to a Grid environment with ease.
At a presentation at Global Grid Forum 4 in Toronto earlier this year,
Tollefsrud said there was "very little direct interfacing" between
commercial applications by independent software vendors (ISVs) and
commercial distributed resource management (DRM) systems. Instead,
"scripted command-line integration by end users" was required for
application integration, he said.
"Adoption is self-limiting to industries where the gain exceeds the
pain," he said. "Fundamental shift in the adoption pattern requires
shifting the DRM integration to the ISV."
DRMAA was set up to help do that. The working group's charter is to
develop an API specification for the submission and control of jobs to
one or more distributed resource management systems.
"The scope of this specification is all the high-level functionality
which is necessary for an application to consign a job to a DRM system,
including common operations on jobs like termination or suspension,"
Tollefsrud said at the Toronto meeting. "The objective is to facilitate
the direct interfacing of applications to today's DRM systems by
applications builders, portal builders, and Independent Software
Vendors."
Improving The Customer Experience
The end result will be faster distributed application deployment,
opportunities for new applications, increased end user confidence,
improvements in Resource Management Systems, and distributed application
portability, he said.
"DRMAA provides a single integration method to the developers of
application software and Grid software," Tollefsrud said. "The goal of
DRMAA is to improve the customer experience: To make it easy for
organizations to choose their applications and Grid software, and then
rapidly integrate them together into a productive environment for
users."
Asked if DRMAA could lead to business process applications being run on
Grids, Tollefsrud replied, "DRMAA will provide application developers
with a high-level interface for spawning tasks from their application,
which can be as useful for enterprise applications as for technical
applications. This is not to say that DRMAA will revolutionize the
building of enterprise applications; there are a number of applications
that, by their nature, don't lend themselves to ad hoc horizontal
scaling. But DRMAA will nonetheless make it feasible to directly
interface the application to the services provided by the local
distributed resource management system, without presenting additional
complexity and integration tasks for the IT staff that is deploying and
maintaining the application and its environment."
Work on DRMAA continued at GGF5 in Edinburgh last month, with more than
100 attendees at the working group sessions, Tollefsrud said.
At GGF5, intellectual property and Grid standards received a lot of
attention, he said, noting that Sun "made a commitment at GGF5 to the
Grid community that all of its contributions to GGF documents will be on
a Royalty-Free basis." Sun invited others to join us in that commitment,
he said.
Tollefsrud said Sun believes that technologies defining XML standards
for the Web, including Web services, should be made available on a
Royalty-Free basis by their owners. Since XML and Grid computing are
emerging common platforms for business on the Web, Royalty-Free "is the
only basis that permits the Web to stay open, not be a toll road owned
by a company or cartel, and permits the free evolution of best-of-breed
technology in an unencumbered atmosphere," he said.
GGF bylaws do not require Royalty-Free contributions, which is
increasingly being adopted by other standards organizations such as W3C,
Tollefsrud said. "GGF bylaws unfortunately do not even require
disclosure of intellectual property in contributions, though such
disclosure is strongly encouraged. This introduces an undesirable
element of uncertainty and risk for adopters, hence Sun's public
commitment at GGF5 to Royalty-Free contributions," he said.
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