Towards an e-Science Roadmap
Tony Hey
Director UK e-Science
Core Programme
Tony.Hey@epsrc.ac.uk
Core Programme Structures
• Technical Advisory Group
- Set up DataBase Taskforce
Chaired by Norman Paton
- Set up Architecture Taskforce
Chaired by Malcolm Atkinson
¾ Provide advice on Grid Data and
Grid Architecture issues
ƒ E-Science Steering Committee
oversees whole e-Science Programme
Why do we need a new
Grid Architecture?
• The Globus Toolkit has emerged as an
international ‘de facto’ standard
- Used by over 60 Grid projects
worldwide
- Offers good pragmatic solutions
for many Grid requirements
• But still much missing functionality
- Database interfaces, accounting,
workflow management, ….
Web Services
• Major effort by IT companies to define
an open standard for Internet-scale
distributed computing
- Supported by all significant IT
companies IBM, Microsoft, HP, Sun, ..
• Example of ‘Service-Oriented
Architecture’ in which everything viewed
either as a provider or consumer of
‘services’
- ‘Publish – Find – Bind’ triangle
Service
Registry
Find
Service
Requestor
Publish
Bind
Service
Provider
Service-Oriented Architecture
Grid Services
• At Global Grid Forum in Toronto in
February, the Globus team and IBM
presented a proposal for an
¾ Open Grid Services Architecture
or ‘OGSA’
• Move towards Grid service approach based
on Web Services widely welcomed at GGF4
and by the UK TAG and by the eSSC
¾ Approach endorsed by two independent
studies (by Gannon and by Kunszt)
commisioned by Core Programme
IT Industry Responses
‘All of our systems will be enabled
to work with the grid, and all of
our middleware will integrate with
the software’
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM
‘Grid Computing is one of the three
next big things for Sun and our
customers’
Ed Zander, COO Sun
Open Grid Services Architecture
• Development of web services
• OGSA will provide
– Naming /Authorization / Security / Privacy
– Higher level services: Workflow, Transactions,
DataBases,Knowledge Discovery,…
¾ Exploit Synergy: Commercial Internet
with Grid Services
Implications for e-Science
Pilot Projects?
Projects using Globus 2.0 Toolkit will
need migration strategy to the OGSA
Grid Service version of Globus
¾ File-based and Compute-centric
projects using Globus 2.0
e.g. GridPP, EU DataGrid
¾ Migration through different Globus
releases will be assisted by
Grid Support Centre
What is a Grid Project?
Essence of a Grid project is the secure
coordinated sharing of heterogeneous
distributed resources
¾ More data-centric projects may elect
to use Service approach via WSDL and
Web Services
¾ Core Programme will support Web Services
version of GSI digital certificates module
¾ How do projects protect their software
investment and migrate to an as yet
not fully defined OGSA?
Some projects will use Globus 2.0
Some projects will use Web Services
¾ Projects need intercept strategy!
OGSA
outcome ?
Web Services
+ GSI web
Globus 2.0
Starting out