Grid Standards Activity

1. Grid Standards Activity Dr Steven Newhouse University of Southampton

2. Some of my hats… • Director of OMII-UK • Chair of the Technical Committee, OMII-Europe • Area Director, Application Standards, Open Grid Forum

3. What is OMII-Europe? • EU funded FP6 project (RI) • Starting May 2006, initial 2 year duration • 16 partners (8 European, 4 USA, 4 Chinese) • Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe • Complimentary to existing national programmes (OMII-UK, NMI, C-OMEGA, OMII-China…) • Goal is to provide key software components for building e-infrastructures • Project will demonstrate “proof of concept” with expectation for a follow-on project in FP7

4. What will OMII-Europe do? • Initial focus on providing common interfaces and integration of major Grid software infrastructures • Common interoperable services: • Database Access • Virtual Organisation Management • Accounting • Job Submission and Job Monitoring • Infrastructure integration • Initial EGEE/UNICORE/Globus interoperability • Interoperable security framework • Access these infrastructure services through a portal

5. OMII-Europe guiding principles • Committed to standards process • Implementing established open standards • Providing feedback to the standards process • e.g. OGF, OASIS, W3C • Quality Assurance • Published methodology and compliance test • All software components have public QA process and audit trail • Working with similar projects and organisations to agree policies • Impartiality • OMII-Europe is “honest broker” providing impartial advice/information on e-infrastructures

6. Who benefits from OMII-Europe? • E-infrastructure providers • Increase the composability of grid software deployments • Use common interfaces to achieve interoperability • Not required to deploy and manage multiple grid distributions • E-science users • Move to selecting resources by service as opposed to distribution • Achieved through low-level interoperability of services • Users not restricted to a specific, fixed set of resources • E-science application developers • Applications can be deployed and run on multiple grid environments through adherence to common services • Not required to develop different solutions for different grids

7. GIN – Grid Interoperability Now • Community activity within the Open Grid Forum • First meeting SuperComputing05, Seattle • Subsequent meetings in Athens, Tokyo & Washington • Many production Grids but little interoperability – Why? • Different software environments • Different policies governing access and use • Defacto as opposed to defined standards • Participants: • TeraGrid, EGEE, UK NGS, PRAGMA, NAREGI, OSG, …

8. GIN: Establish Interoperability Islands • Jobs Submission • Pre WS-GRAM • WS-GRAM • Job Submission Description Language (JSDL) & Basic Execution Service (BES) • Information Services • Federated Information Services • EGEE, OSG, NAREGI • Storage • SRB • SRM

9. GIN: Establish Interoperability Islands • Data Movement • GridFTP • Authorisation • VOMS • Application • Testing the infrastructures

10. How could OMII-Europe help? • Repository of open-source, quality assured software • Sourced from partners and broader community: • EGEE, Globus, UNICORE, CROWNgrid, OMII-UK, … • Some services bundled with major grid distributions • Impartial public reports on grid infrastructures • Benchmarking results • Portability results (platforms, environments, …) • Conformance results • Interoperability results • Evaluation infrastructure to “test” services • User support and training for services

11. Repository of open-source software • Make available software reengineered within OMII-Europe and contributed by third parties • Single services/tools & complete distributions • Provide an interface to select software from the repository based on user requirements • By capability/standards/provider/… • Support the upload, download and installation of the software • Document platform portability & pre-requisites • Verify the software through compliance & metrics tests

12. Behind the Repository • Leverage existing infrastructure & projects • ETICS • Capture build & test configuration data for repeatability • NMI Build & Test Framework • Manage cross-platform environment for build & tests • Condor • Underlying execution infrastructure • Provides reports to be displayed within the portal • Builds: Pre-requisites & platforms • Testing: Conformance & Interoperability

13. Tests For Standards Conformance • Job Submission and Job Monitoring • Job Submission Description Language (JSDL) • Basic Execution Service (BES) • Accounting • Usage Record (UR) • Resource Usage Service (RUS) • Database Access • WS-DAI, WS-DAIX, WS-DAIR (OGSA-DAI) • Virtual Organisation Management • Move towards SAML2?

14. Early Activity at SC06 • High Performance Computing Profile • Focus on ‘simple’ Job Submission to a cluster • JSDL: XML Document specifying the job to be run • BES: The service interface for creating & managing a job • Participation by Microsoft, Platform, OMII-UK, CROWNGrid, Globus, Univeristy of Virginia, … • Exploring use of OMII-Europe infrastructure • To use a single client to access multiple providers • Different clients to access different providers

15. Summary • Repository of software to support e-Science • For end-users, application developers, deployers, .. • Federating information from multiple sources • Make sure the software works on different platforms • Use quality assurance metrics to assess software • Link to support infrastructures & documentation • Report on standards compliance • Infrastructure to support the honest brokering • You make the decision as to the software you use • You know what it works with

16. OMII-Europe Project Partners 114 person years over 2 years, 5 million Euro, 4 major Grid infrastructures

17. OMII-Europe Vision To demonstrate that interoperable Grids can be built from standards-compliant Web Services and to deliver a set of quality-assured services, sourced from open source repositories, able to be used on the principal Grid infrastructures in use in Europe today.