Open Grid Forum 21 Report
Omer Rana (GridNet ID: 107)
Cardiff University
This report provides an overview of my involvement in research and working
groups at the Open Grid Forum (OGF) 21 meeting in Seattle, October 15–19,
2007. Web 2.0 and social network-based technologies still continue to provide
an important new growth area. I participated in the following activities:
• Participant: GRAAP working group sessions
• Participant: Arts and Humanities Research Group (newly formed)
• Participant: JSDL working group
• Co-organizer: GridNet2 eScience Workshop
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GRAAP
The GRAAP working group involved three sessions – focusing on the currently
released specification of WS-Agreement. The first session was dedicated to discussion about interoperability and conformance testing of implementations to
the current specification. Two implementations of WS-Agreement were identified – one from the Fraunhofer Institute and the other from Technical University
of Berlin. The aim of this first session was to discuss the current status of these
implementations, and when these were likely to be made available to the general
Grid community. A key point of discussion in this context related to identifying
what aspects of the specification needed to be tested within the interoperability
experiments. For instance, if the inner language was being considered, then
perhaps this would be testing a job submission system (considering JSDL being used), and perhaps not the WS-Agreement specification in particular. No
particular consensus was reached, and further discussion is necessary to identify
use cases for interoperability testing. A Wiki has been set up, and one scenario
has so far been described. The next steps in this context involve identifying
additional scenarios.
The second session focused on identifying “microspecs” that could be used as
inner languages within WS-Agreement. Currently, JSDL, BES and a Network
microspec are being considered. The group discussed whether it was necessary
to consider a subset of the existing JSDL specification for interoperability experiments, and more specifically, which tags from JSDL should be used for this
purpose.
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The third session was focussed on discussion of Negotiation protocols that
can be used alongside WS-Agreement. It was generally agreed that negotiation
was seen as an additional capability that could be built above the existing WSAgreement specification. As the specification had recently been approved, there
was reluctance to make any modifications to the specification in its current form
(until interoperability and conformance tests of existing implementations were
completed).
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GridNet2 eScience Workshop
This workshop was organized in collaboration with Ian Taylor (Cardiff) and
Stephen McGough (Imperial College), and had the following objectives:
1. To highlight work that the UK eScience community is doing at the OGF
and in related standards bodies (such as W3C).
2. To support interaction between people from the UK, and others interested
in efforts within the UK eScience community.
3. To encourage working across different working groups – as many people
in GridNet2 are active participants of OGF.
The workshop involved presentations from a number of GridNet2 funded researchers (more details can be found on the Wiki
(http://wiki.cs.cf.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Sandbox/OpenGridForum21)
– along with presentation slides). The workshop demonstrated a number of
overlaps in interests across the different participants funded by GridNet2.
It was generally agreed that a UK dissemination event would be useful to
organize – perhaps alongside the UK eScience All Hands Meeting – such an
event could focus purely on standards activities. Attendance at the workshop
was rather disappointing overall. However, the discussion towards the end of
the workshop, focusing on GridNet2 sustainability, was useful and interesting.
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JSDL Working Group
The JSDL working group sessions focused on comparing terms supported in
existing Grid scheduling systems – such as GridWay, Globus, UNICORE and
Genesis II. The discussion focused on which terms were likely to be important
when considering job submission across these different systems. Discussion focusing on similar experiences when developing the DRMAA API was interesting.
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Arts and Humanities Research Group
The Arts and Humanities Research Group began with two invited talks – focusing primarily on UK and European funded projects in this area. The first was
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given by Alexander Voss (Edinburgh University) and the second (via a telecon.
link) by Tobias Blanke (Kings College London). It was interesting to see the
very wide range of projects being undertaken in this area, and overlap of interests with other areas of eScience (such as the significant emphasis on intellectual
property rights). Arts and Humanities provide a useful new domain that could
provide new requirements for eScience.
Interestingly, Tobias Blanke outlined the need for workflow systems, data
management and semantic annotations to existing data archives, as being some
of the key technology enablers for arts and humanities applications.
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