OGF19 Meeting Report Chapel Hill
29 Jan – 2 Feb, 2007
Prepared by Richard Hughes-Jones – GridNet ID: 102
The University of Manchester
R.Hughes-Jones@Manchester.ac.uk
I attended the following Working Group and Research Group Sessions:
1 Astronomy Applications Group discussion
sessions 1 and 2, Monday 29 Jan.
An immediate aim was to contact other OGF working groups to ascertain whether the
needs of Astronomy analysis were being catered for by the Grid community.
They have created a Requirements document (OGF informational).
The Astronomy needs focus on using specialised “workbench” (portal) techniques to
perform global searches of their data archives for sky images. Unlike Particle Physics,
the astronomers do not tend to write analysis programs or code for a given
investigation.
In response to a question, the group is not (yet) considering the needs of Radio
Astronomy which is currently using 512 Mbit/s real-time data flows from the
telescopes to the corellator; and researching how to make use of Grid farms for
distributed correlation.
After the meeting I had discussions with the co-chair , to suggest participation at the
e-science stands planned for OGF20 in Manchester.
2 OFG Opening Tuesday 30 Jan
It was interesting to note the emphasis on tangible deliverables and the emphasis on
producing draft standards. Also it was good to see improving alignment of Academic
and Industrial/Commercial interests.
3 Firewall Issues Research Group Tuesday 30 Jan
A very good meeting with many informative presentations. The different firewall
techniques were presented and discussed in detail. There was a focus on security of
setting up a switched Lambdas or Lightpaths between computing sites / hosts. For
example: if user A is correctly authenticated by the middleware and sets up a
Lightpath between two sites, how is user B, who is not allowed to use this link,
prevented from making use of the Lightpath? Very relevant to the current Remote
Farm work by the ATLAS Trigger/DAQ group – and others.
4 Particle and Nuclear Physics Applications
Wednesday 31 January
A good discussion of needs and issues, it was suggested that contact with the
Astronomy Applications Group would be beneficial.
5 Town Hall meeting Wednesday 31 January
6 Infrastructure Area Meeting Wednesday 31 January
This was a small meeting. It reviewed the current work of this area and discussed if
investigation of other infrastructure items like storage would be useful.
It appears that the groups currently in the Infrastructure Area are progressing well. It
was agreed to continue examining other areas that might be included in the
infrastructure area.
7 Network Measurement Working Group Sessions on
Thursday 1 February
I chaired all the NM-WG sessions at OGF 19
The first session presented a summary of the OGF.23 Draft Standard and reviewed the
current position on the version 2 Schemata. It was agreed to progress a draft standard
document on the version 2 Schemata, check for any minor updates to the OGF.23
Draft Standard, and then produce an OGF Experimental document to move OGF.23 to
a standard.
The second session worked on the document for the version 2 Schemata.
8 Grids and System Virtualisation Group on
Thursday 1 February
This group will examine the OFG work to see if the use of virtual machines and
systems needs extra support of features to operate in the Gird.
9 Storage Networking Community Group.
There was a presentation of the proposed work on storage management in the Grid
from two storage vendors. They focused on commercial data centres, but the issues
and requirements seemed very similar to that work that has been going on in the
academic community Grids and in the OGF Standards Council.
There seemed to be no plan to create “use-case requirements” or “best practice”
documents but rather to ask the group to produce “code” to solve the perceived
problems in commercial data centres.
10 Grid High Performance Networking Meeting on
Friday 2 February.
There were several presentations on different techniques being investigated for
network resource management and Lightpath or link reservation. There were
questions and discussion of the issues of interoperation between different Grids when
considering network resource management.
There was also much discussion on the new draft of the “Grid User Network
Interface” document, which seems to be making progress.