Report on Activities funded under Gridnet2
Donal Fellows (#125), July 2007 – February 2008
Donal used his funding to attend two OGF meetings (OGF21 in Seattle in October
2007, and OGF22 in Boston in February 2008) and two OGSA Face-to-Face meetings
(at Fujitsu America in Sunnyvale, CA, in August 2007, and at Imperial College in
London in January 2008). This enabled him to significantly participate in the following OGF Working Groups:
 Open Grid Software Architecture (OGSA)
 Job Submission Description Language (JSDL)
 Usage Record (UR)
 OGSA Resource Usage Service (RUS)
 OGSA Resource Selection Service (RSS)
 HPC Profile (HPCP)
 Reference Model (RM)
 GLUE1
 Grid Scheduling Architecture (GSA)
 Grid Resource Allocation Agreement Protocol (GRAAP)
He also attended the Education and Training Community Group to help work towards
a common core syllabus for teaching people about the Grid, which is of key importance for making Grid Computing a long-term research field.
The major themes of Donal’s activities within OGF are split into four:
1. Description of Grid Entities, which encompasses his work within the JSDL,
RM and GLUE groups.
2. Discovery of Grid Entities, which encompasses his work within the RSS,
JSDL, HPCP and GSA groups.
3. Accounting of Grid Entities, which encompasses his work within the UR and
RUS groups.
4. Architecture for Higher-Order Grids, which encompasses his work within
the OGSA, GSA and GRAAP groups.
The work within the OGSA and GSA groups at the architectural level is part of drawing the other strands together to produce a significant part of the architecture for execution and management of jobs on a higher-level Grid that abstracts the details of its
implementation away from the model that it presents to users. The work in OGSA
also encompasses work to try to “cross-fertilize” best practice and lessons learned
from one group to another, which greatly multiplies the effectiveness of the groups
concerned.
Outcomes in Period
Documents with Significant Input

The RSS group (co-chaired by Donal) has moved a document through its public comment stage and is working on resolving the comments.
1 The GLUE-WG is developing GLUE2, an update to the GLUE Information Model developed originally under the EU DATAGRID project.


The JSDL group has prepared an errata release to the JSDL v1 specification,
and has published extensions for HPC integration and Parallel Applications.
The OGSA group has published documents on a glossary of Grid terms, on
how to model entities on the Grid, on how to draw the models together (how
to use rich queries encapsulated within JSDL against the GLUE2 information
model), and an updated description of usage scenarios for specifications in the
OGSA space for the execution of non-trivial jobs.
Notable Chair/Membership Events


Donal has become co-chair of the UR group.
He has also agreed to act as editor of the Reference Model.