Current and Future Perspectives of Grid Technology Panel

1. Current and Future Perspectivesof Grid TechnologyPanel Advanced Research Workshop onHigh Performance Computing Cetraro June 1 2004 Geoffrey Fox Community Grids Lab Indiana University gcf@indiana.edu

2. Questions I • Is it wise or risky to start a new Grid? • There are no significant dangers if one adopts a conservative technology strategy • Use the basic service architecture; including applications • Use simple Web Services starting with those in WS-I • Others will be added and can be classified in terms of risk of adoption and probability of change • Use proven capabilities such as Condor, Globus 2, GridFTP, GridRPC; RGMA, SRB, OGSA-DAI, UNICORE good but less clear; risk depends on project of course • Use workflow model and expect BPEL to win but be incomplete • Use portlet architecture for user interfaces • Build services as small as possible and match choice of services and interfaces to others (OGSA?) • Use messaging where possible; avoid frameworks • Performance will improve; SOAP can use fastest transport

3. Status of WS-Standards • In order of increasing risk, we start with • WS-Interoperability Profile 1.0a (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI). • WS-Security being added gradually • WS-Reliability and WS-ReliableMessaging are generally believed to be technically close, and sound. The risk of adopting one of them is therefore relatively low. • BPEL is an important, emerging, widely-supported workflow specification though it is not yet a standard. • There are then some standards were Microsoft and IBM agree but others (Sun, Oracle often) do not • WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-MetadataExchange, WS-Federation, WS-Coordination, WS-Atomic Transactions, WS-BusinessActivity. Implementations of these are available from both IBM and Microsoft,

4. Questions II • What are Pacing Items: • Problems with existing Middleware: • Several efforts are focusing on building robust middleware – VDT, Globus, NSF NMI, UK OMII, EU EGEE, WS-? From industry • Just be patient and don’t “jump the gun” – not necessary • Standards will take a while as not enough experience • Initial Grids can use current “initial software” • Scarcity of people: • Doubtful in USA: we need jobs!! • Security Concerns • Security consensus and technology most serious problem for Grids. Other problems have clearer engineering solutions • Policy for sharing resources • There are security issues and some fields are not familiar with sharing observational data but it hasn’t bothered my projects

5. Questions III • How long will it take for Grids to be prevalent • Grids, P2P, Enterprise systems, Utility computing. Web services will intermingle and merge. If we call the amalgam a Grid it will become prevalent in 3-5 years in “pretty big” Science; longer in a broader environment • Good software for “many” of important services should be available in 2 years • What is your one wish • That collaborative/community Grids become sufficiently good that one doesn’t need to travel as much • Last mile networking is critical!