Welcome
Grids and Applied Language Theory
Dave Berry
Research Manager
www.nesc.ac.uk
16th October 2003
NeSC in the UK
Globus
Alliance
National
eScience
Centre
HPC(x)
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Newcastle
Belfast
Directors’ Forum
Engineering Task Force
Grid Support Centre
Architecture Task Force
UK Adoption of OGSA
OGSA Grid Market
Workflow Management
Database Task Force
OGSA-DAI
GGF DAIS-WG
GridNet
e-Storm
Daresbury Lab
Manchester
Cambridge
Hinxton
Oxford
Cardiff
RAL
London
Southampton
www.nesc.ac.uk
UK e-Science Grid
Currently based on Globus Toolkit 2
Transition to OGSI/ OGSA over the next year
Heterogenous
Many architectures and operating systems
Many organisations
Many issues still to be resolved, e. g.
OGSA definition / delivery
Portals
Combinations of Services supported
Account management and accounting
Workshop Goals
Well-Targeted Collaborative Research
Increase understanding
Results expected:
Identify Research Opportunities
Propose potential project and funding
Extract Cross-cutting Issues
Deliver a Written Report
What is a “Grid”?
Compute/File Grid
Run multiple jobs with distributed compute and data resources
Desktop Grid
“Internet Computing” and “Cycle Scavenging” with secure
sandbox on large numbers of untrusted computers
Information Grid (a.k.a. Data Grid)
Grid service access to distributed repositories
Complexity Grid
Hybrid combination of Information and Compute/File Grid
Campus Grid
Grid supporting University community computing
Enterprise Grid
Grid supporting a company’s enterprise infrastructure
e-Science Gap Analysis, David Walker and Geoffrey Fox,
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2003-01/index.html
One definition: A Grid…
…coordinates resources that are not subject to
centralized control …
… using standard, open, general-purpose
protocols and interfaces…
… to deliver nontrivial qualities of service.
Ian Foster, “What is the Grid: A three-point checklist”,
GRIDToday, July 20, 2002
OGSA
Open Grid Services Architecture
Share
Access Manage
resource resource resource
Continuous
Availability
Applications on
demand
Secure and
universal access
Business
integration
Web Services
Resources
on demand
Global
Accessibility
Vast resource
scalability
Grid Protocols
Some Grid Requirements
From the Globus Project
Dynamic formation and management of virtual
organisations
Online negotiation of access to services: who,
what, why, when, how
Configuration of applications and systems able
to deliver multiple qualities of service
Autonomic management of distributed
infrastructures, services, and applications
More Grid Requirements
Trust (e.g. authorisation, mobile code, data
provenance, quality of service)
Programming model for distributed systems
(informal reasoning, debugging, formal
reasoning)
Compositionality (of Services, Policies, …)
E.g. Data Delivery Patterns
Greg Riccardi, Florida State University, while
visiting the National e-Science Institute
Retrieve
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Applications for Language Theory
Mobile Code
Security
Provenance
Process calculi, models and types
Model checking
Distributed data queries
Dynamic data
Workflow languages and enactment engines
Types for XML
Semantic Web/Grid …
Postscript: What’s in a name?
“Grids and Applied Language Theory”
“It doesn’t seem to have much to do with languages”
“Languages aren’t my field”
“I’m not coming unless you drop the word ‘Grid’”
Alternatives?
Fundamental Computer Science for e-Science?

But “e-Science” isn’t understood outside the UK
Computer Science for Web Services?