The Grid Forum

by Michèle Huijberts
initial   4 December 2000
edit	  17 January 2001
   
My opinion on the Grid.

To discuss further...

The Global Grid Forum is a group formed by individuals from within the 
international community of researchers and practitioners engaged in 
research, development, deployment and support activities related to 
high-capability distributed software systems or "grids". The scope of the 
applications that motivate these activities is quite broad, including for 
example high performance processing applications, distributed collaborative 
environments, distributed data analysis, and remote instrumental control. 

The Grid Forum (GF) initiated a Grid Forum Steering Group and organized 
working group with special interest. The GF have done this in the same way 
as the organization of IETF and IRTF. Organizations you all are more 
familiar with, than I am. 

The working groups (WG) are:
- Account Management
- Advanced Programming Models
- Application & Testbeds
- Grid Computing
- Environments (NEW)
- Grid Information Services
- Grid Performance
- Remote Data Access
- Scheduling
- Security
- User Services


The definition of the interests of GF is very broad. So everything you would 
like to put in the this definition fits. But, does this mean that the core 
interests from our group will fit. There are a lot of things done within the 
context of the Grid, which are of interest to our group (generating 
documents). This does not mean we are to participate the GF. I come back 
to this at the end of this document. 

First I would like to sum up some of the possible overlaps with parts of the 
working group. Together with the reason why I think there is an overlap with 
the interests of INS2.

The Account Management tries to make a distributed accounting system. 
Nowadays systems one needs to have a account on each system one wants data 
from. The systems are growing beyond the scale of doing so. With the help of 
a distributed accounting system one can distribute the accounting data. This 
means we are able to look in the database from the Rijksmuseum (because we 
have access to that), but also from other museums, which contain information 
on the topic we are looking for. The accounting system charges the user for 
these data if needed.

By using such a system one can benefit from the fact that data coming from 
different sources does not have to duplicated and still is available with the 
right context (semantics and/or rhetorics).

The Grid Information System WG is concerned with services that either provide 
information or consume information pertaining to the Grid by using LDAP 
facilities and meta information. I expect everybody is aware of the advantages
of these services. 

The Data Access WG is focusing on the implementation of support of data 
handling, remote processing, publications, information discovery and analysis.
This is done to achieve name transparency, location transparency, protocol 
transparency and latency hiding functionality. By exploiting this users can 
access data in a consistent and transparent way. 

There are more working groups and there is a lot of overlap between the 
groups, although their focus is slightly different. 


Of course all of these items are important in general and to INS2 in 
particular. The GF facilitates an infrastructure which can be used in a 
special interest group. There is a resemblance with the development of 
the Virtual Laboratory from faculty of science (computer science). Remember 
me mentioning it during the presentation about my work in the AMC??

The global schema from the Virtual Lab (VL) is in next figure:

_______________________________________________________________
|							      |
|    Applications field like: Bioinformatics		      |
|			      Physics Computing		      |
|			      System Engineering		      |
|							      |
|_____________________________________________________________|
|                 |                     |		      |           
|		  |			|		      |
|     VIMCO	  |     COMCOL		|     VISE	      |
| VL Information  | Communications      | Virtual Simulation  |
| Management for  | and Collaborations  | and Exploration     |
| Cooperations    |			| Environment	      |
|		  |			|		      |
|_____________________________________________________________|
|							      |
|							      |
|                      GLOBUS				      |
| Distributed computing and Gigabit Local Area Network	      |
|							      |
|_____________________________________________________________|

		   
So resemblance is that the GLOBUS Forum Working Groups are parts of the 
schema from the VL. As one can see in the schema Applications are on top of 
the underlying infrastructure. This is a distributed infrastructure. Within 
the AMC our group was focusing on the utilization of this infrastructure. 
There are several reason for doing so; large datasets, expensive equipment to 
name a few.

The same is true for INS2. There are a lot issues within the GF which are 
important. The focus within INS2 is on the top half of the schema. This 
implies that we more or less use the infrastructure and develop it. 

This is my personal opinion. It does not imply that we should NOT participate 
in one way or another. Talking with the Grid people is one thing. If the 
infrastructure is designed in a way we can not deal with it, than we have 
a problem. So by talking we can steer them in the right direction.


Hopefully we can discuss it more ...





Michèle Huijberts.


 LocalWords:  GF Rijksmuseum rhetorics WG LDAP VL Bioinformatics GLOBUS Mich le