GridNet Funding Report: Global Grid Forum 16
13-16 February 2006
Athens, Greece
Prof Richard Sinnott
National e-Science Centre
University of Glasgow
GridNet ID 97
This report summarises my attendance at GGF16 and its relevance to current NeSC activities.
Meetings Attended
th
Tuesday 14 February
• GGF16 Keynote – Ian Foster
• Update from UK/Italy - Neil Geddes
• Semantic Grid 101
• Grid Education and Training
• ShibGrid workshop #1
• caGrid
th
Wednesday 15 February
• ShibGrid workshop #2
• Security Area Meeting
• CAOPS
• Town Meeting
• Life Science Grid Research Group
Relevance to NeSC
The security and life science focus of NeSC-Glasgow (including numerous projects such as VOTES,
DyVOSE, GHI, GEMEPS, ESP-Grid, GEODE, GLASS) provided the main motivation for attending the
GGF16 meeting. Specifically the session on ShibGrid and the life science research group was the
primary purpose for my attending this GGF meeting.
I gave a presentation at the ShibGrid meeting demonstrating how we have already successfully
demonstrated the integration of Shibboleth and Grid technologies at NeSC in Glasgow. It appears that we
are ahead of the rest in this regard, who seem to be still working on architectural aspects and interaction
scenarios to support Shib and Grid integration (or Grid and Shib integration). The role of VOs and
having multiple federated attribute repositories was discussed. There are different possibilities here
which need to be worked through. The group has decided to push forward on this and share ideas through
establishing an email list and setting up a test infrastructure for exploring Shib and Grid integration.
Nate Klingstein gave an update on SAML 2.0 and Shibboleth 2.0 and 2.1 developments which will
change some of the underlying technologies – and as usual the claim is that this will be for the better. It
was also claimed that these would be backwards compatible with Shibboleth 1.3, hence existing solutions
should not be adversely affected. Time will tell how the landscape and the wider Shib and Grid efforts
will be impacted.
David Chadwick gave his PERMIS+Grid+Shib talk which nobody had much to comment on. We have
been exploring many of these things directly in the DyVOSE project.
Von Welch gave a talk on ShibGrid and what the Globus folk want to do. This was a repetition of
previous talks so not much to offer – other than they are still working back to front in that they access the
Grid in the usual way and then use Shib to return attributes which is basically wrong in my opinion.
Erik Vullings gave an interesting talk on the Australian MAMS project which seems to be the most
advanced of the rest of the groups. They have implemented attribute release tools which might well be
worth exploring in future. I have suggested that we might do some joined up efforts with him and his
group at Macquarie University in Sydney.
The UK GridShib and SHEBANGS projects were presented, but these have not started yet. Oxford
(GridShib) is looking at starting with a requirements gathering process, which concerns me as it is only a
1 year project. The SHEBANGS project had concrete ideas for how things would pan-out but their
designs seem unduly complicated, a fact noted by Nate Klingstein who identified that there were many
points of failure. That said, they have started with detailed ideas of how things will pan out when there
are multiple identity providers and attribute authorities, and how this will work with Grid based scenarios
using MyProxy.
The Semantic Grid workshop was interesting and might be of relevance in future. It was extremely well
attended with 100+ folk crammed in. There are a couple of things that are not 100% clear to me on how
ontologies and data standards actually work. It seems that one only has to focus on OWL now as this
incorporates DAML+OIL and RDF. The semantics grid folk are now looking at using semantic grid for
everything from user descriptions, to resource broking, to security infrastructures. It is worth monitoring
in future (and possibly getting a couple of students to do some explorations with this stuff for the future).
The caGrid meeting was of relevance to VOTES and GHI. They are a huge healthcare project in the US
(over $100M and over 500 partners) looking at cancer related research and healthcare in general. They
have already been in contact regarding synergies with VOTES efforts. They described a very detailed
methodology but when asked, they still do not have any real data, i.e. patient data. It is worth looking at
what they have been up to though to see if we can learn anything. They have a security report for
healthcare which is worth looking into. I am not sure why they had a full session just for themselves; it
would have been more useful if we had been invited to compare our solutions also.
The security area meeting was a recap on what the groups had been looking into plus a presentation from
Microsoft who have plans in this area. They described the numerous technologies which they want to use
to support delegation of authorisation and enterprise security integration more generally. This was
interesting, but when asked they did not comment on how they would or would not be interoperable with
existing GGF efforts. It is clear that they have plans in the Grid arena and security is very much part of
these plans.
The Grid Education workshop was of relevance due to the teaching we already undertake at NeSC
Glasgow. I’m happy with the idea of sharing information on how best to train and educate and would
ideally like to be more involved in these activities. Not sure what we need to get from others as we have
a successful full course established, but if it helps others then I’m willing.
The town meeting was not especially interesting, and the CAOPS meeting was a group it seemed looking
for a home within GGF and also not especially enlightening. I only caught the latter half of this meeting
though due to discussions with other attendees during the break (maybe I missed the good stuff!?)
The Life Science Grid Research Group meeting was very disappointing. There was no agenda, the
organisers did not show up, and the dial in did not work. There were around 30 people who turned up
too. Piotr Bala tried his best to organise the meeting and fill in for missing organisers, but it was obvious
that he had no chance to really do this well. Lots of security folk attended this meeting who were
probably taken in by the workshop title, but there were few concrete things discussed. They are looking
for someone to come in and help drive things forward. I will likely do this once I get back. I proposed the
idea of setting up a real healthcare Grid and life science Grid development activity, i.e. implementing
real Grids for real test purposes. This should form the basis for concrete evaluations of GGF standards
and technologies, as all research groups should be doing instead of being arbitrary talking shops. We
have existing solutions which could form the basis for these efforts, e.g. dummy healthcare data sets and
existing repositories and existing bioinformatics Grid services and databases etc. I am sure folk would be
interested in doing something if they thought it was for a real reason. I wrote a couple of documents
previously as requested at a previous GGF by the group’s organisers. I did so and sent them to the list but
never had any response/feedback. This has to change or this group will fade away which would be a
shame as it is very much in our area (and lots of others are interested to).
All in all not a particularly fulfilling GGF for me (GridShib wasn’t that bad I guess). We need strong
leadership to drive work forward and make real plans with real milestones, for GGF to be worthwhile.