GridNet Funding Report
Open Grid Forum 22
25-28th February 2008
Cambridge, US
Prof Richard Sinnott
National e-Science Centre
University of Glasgow
r.sinnott@nesc.gla.ac.uk
This report summarises my attendance at OGF22 in Cambridge and its
relevance to current NeSC activities.
Meetings Attended
Monday 25th February
• Opening Session
• OGSA-RUS specification
• OGSA AuthZ
• Security Area Meeting
• AuthZ interoperation demos
Tuesday 26th
• OGC-OGF
• OGC-OGF
• OGC-OGF
February
(1/3)
(2/3)
(3/3)
Wednesday 27th February
• Encyclopaedia of Life
• Financial services workshop
• Keynote on cloud computing
• Pharma, Biotech and Life Sciences workshop (1/2)
• Pharma, Biotech and Life Sciences workshop (2/2)
• Town Hall meeting
Thursday 28th February
• Grid Usage and Productivity
• Data Management workshop (1/2)
• Data Management workshop (2/2)
I left the meeting on Thursday afternoon.
Relevance to NeSC
All of the meetings I attended have direct relevance to projects at NeSC
Glasgow.
The OGSA-RUS workshop was useful in that it gave me an overview of the
various specs and approaches on-going in this area – especially relevant
given the full economic costing and need for accounting on Glasgow
resources such as ScotGrid. At the start of the meeting, the chair (Morris
Riedel) actually took the time to go around the room to find out the
background of attendees on the RUS specs and made sure that he
covered the background information needed to bring people up to speed. I
think that this should be part of many (all?) working group meetings
The OGSA AuthZ WG was split in to two meetings. The first of these
covered the discussions on the recent standards that have been put
together. The VPman project in which NeSC is directly involved have been
working on the implementation and exploitation of these standards. I
gave a presentation and demonstration on one of these standards
focusing on use of VOMS attributes being pushed to services for
authorisation decisions to be made on access to use Grid services
protected by PERMIS. This was made in the context of the VOTES project.
The pull model specification is to be explored within the nanoCMOS
project – hence the authZ specifications map directly onto the
requirements and scenarios in NeSC projects.
On Tuesday I attended all three of the OGC-OGF workshops. This was
both a fact finding effort in understanding what is happening in the
geospatial and geospatial standards space. Furthermore, through the
NeSC involvement in the SeeGEO project and the recently ESRC funded
DAMES NCeSS node in which NeSC is directly involved, knowing more
about how to access and use geospatial data in social science and
epidemiological studies is very much aligned with future NeSC work.
Based on this meeting, initial ideas are being pursued on collaboration
with some of the attendees.
On Wednesday I attended the Encyclopaedia of Life presentation which
covered an interesting area. I also attended the financial services
workshop, an area I am not directly involved in but am interested in. I
was hoping that the security technologies and scenarios we have been
working on might find a niche in this area, but the talks were more about
HPC and performance.
I attended the keynote on Cloud computing. It is not clear to me how the
ideas of ensembles as presented differed from the vision of virtual
organisations as we currently support them. That said, I have a PhD
student looking into configuration management and Grid technologies and
there may be some mileage in pursuing some investigation into this latest
OGF buzz.
I attended the Pharma workshop since it maps directly onto numerous
projects at NeSC. The panel session at the end was especially interesting.
I still feel that the Grid community have not yet grasped that the
standards and technologies and their deployment in live clinical settings.
On Thursday I attended the Grid Usage and Productivity in HPC which was
essentially a talk about Tabor Research and Grid marketing. I also
attended the data management workshop and listened to talks about
commercial-oriented data management including for example the day to
day reality of managing the eBay infrastructures. It was interesting, but I
am not sure how relevant these large scale industrial infrastructures
reflect on the day to day activities of academic Grid-related research.
All in all, I enjoyed this OGF! As with the Seattle meeting, this was not the
best attended of OGF’s but this was discussed at length at the Town
Meeting, both in terms of the financial situation of OGF and the need to
avoid clashes with conferences. For example, the next OGF in Barcelona
clashes with OGC meetings in Germany and with the HealthGrid
conference in Chicago. That said it is co-located with the BEinGrid
conference. Selecting dates that avoid clashes is a non-trivial matter given
the scope of OGF and the groups and research domains it covers.