Grid vision of distant resource sharing gives birth to powerful virtual organisationsHeidelberg 21 jun 2002 In his talk at ISC2002, Ian Foster from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago discussed the architectural concepts underlying Grid systems. He also described the Globus Toolkit which has emerged as the de facto standard for Grid computing, and outlined recent progress towards the integration of Grid and Web services technologies in the proposed Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
On-demand, ubiquitous access to computational power, data bases and services empowers scientific research and industrial production towards new capabilities transparently and dynamically generated from distributed services, Ian Foster started his presentation, but there is a strong need to efficiently manage this huge post-electronic availability of distributed infrastructures, applications and services. This is an enormous challenge which requires solutions at a high technical level to handle secure access to multiple qualities of distributed services and application configuration in a distributed state.
To meet this challenge, the Globus Toolkit was developed in 1996 as a small standards-based set of protocols for distributed system management in an information-centric design for open source implementation. The Large Hadron Collider project at CERN is an example of a large virtual organisation in which 1800 physicists from 150 institutes in 32 countries are represented to deal with 100 PB of data by 2010. Other Grid projects in eScience are GriPhyn, NeesGrid, AstroGrid, FusionGrid, Condor, and so on. An organisation such as NASA is applying Grid technology for aviation safety. In the area of the Life Sciences, researchers are collaborating by means of telemicroscopy.
Within the business sector, we witness the rise of concepts like "eUtility" and business-to-business computing. Here, the quality-of-service requirements are even higher, as Ian Foster noted, and will lead to the so-called "Green Screen" meaning that ubiquitous web presence and intelligence-embedded networking are offered to the industry. This will be the answer to the enterprise computing crisis by delivering on-demand computing, storage and services. Early examples of industrial grids are Entropia, the Butterfly Grid, and FightAIDS@home.
However, there is still a lot of work to do, Ian Foster warned. Grid experts need to generate management and component models to provide distributed services and to achieve the automation of infrastructure operation, thus enabling economies of scale. This is where the Open Grid Services Architecture comes in to establish standard interfaces and behaviours for distributed system management. OGSA is typically concerned with the management of service instances, whether persistent or transient.
Therefore, OGSA aims at defining fundamental WDSL interfaces and behaviours to establish a Grid service in the open source Global Toolkit 3.0 (GT3), with the addition of commercial implementations, according to Ian Foster. The Grid service instance maintains a set of service data elements by encapsulating XML fragments in standard containers. The FindServiceData operation queries this information and allows notification of service existence and modifications in service. The GT3 OGSA solution includes GT3 Core and Base Services as well as many other Grid services.
Ian Foster summarised the Grid experience as a successful attempt to manage resource sharing and co-ordinated problem solving across dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organisations both in eScience and eBusiness. The means to accomplish this are delivered with the Globus Toolkit and by relying on a strong community organisation which is the Global Grid Forum. The speaker hoped that OGSA will form the next step in Grid development by establishing standard interfaces and behaviours to orient and disseminate the multiple services.
Leslie Versweyveld |
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