News and Information for the Open Grid Forum Community
In this issue:
“I think that OGF25 was a great success. The co-location with the EGEE User Forum results in a conference with an excellent breadth of topics and interests, so much so that it’s always hard to decide which sessions to attend! I also think that OGF25 was a success, not only as a conference, but from the point of view of the standards activities that occurred.
This was the first OGF where the Production Grid Infrastructure working group met, and they had some very successful sessions, both in terms of outreach and working sessions. We also can look forward to the formation of a couple of new working groups. The Cloud Computing API BoF attracted over 100 people, and had quite widespread interest in moving forward as a working group. Also, the workshop on Green IT resulted in the desire to form a 'CO2 working group', which will work on standards that help organizations to operate their data centres in more 'green efficient' ways.
I’m quite excited to see the birth of these new activities in OGF. It speaks to the desire of various communities of interest to work on standards and specifications within the open model that the OGF provides. I look forward to watching as these activities unfold.”
-Paul Strong, Ebay and OGF Board Member
EGEE Press Releases
OGF-Europe
Towards the end of 2008, the OGF Grid Interoperation Now (GIN) community group started a spin-off standardization activity named Production Grid Infrastructure (PGI) working group. Both groups complement each other and thus GIN proceeds to enable real e-science applications that require resources in more than one production infrastructure demonstrating the technical feasibility of interoperability using open standards wherever possible. The PGI group complements GIN activities by embedding gained GIN experience in refinements of OGF specifications and the missing links between them. Thus the overall goal is to realize an ecosystem that consists of a set of profiles of well-known open standards already used in production (OGSA-BES, JSDL, GridFTP, SRM, GLUE2). During this process the PGI group provides feedback to the standardization groups of these standards via liaisons with them. Once the PGI ecosystem has been defined and deployed on production infrastructures the GIN group will work on demonstrating that the ecosystem works in daily production use cases that require interoperable infrastructures and may consider new emerging standards as inputs to the PGI group. Both groups GIN and PGI are supported via OGF-Europe with a secretary position.
While having already participants from production Grids such as EGEE, DEISA, NorduGrid, NAREGI and such like, OGF25 was a great chance to get an even broader range of people involved in the PGI group. Therefore, the PGI group organized a PGI workshop in close collaboration with OGF-Europe and conducted three working group sessions to work on the greater PGI ecosystem standards in general and the security elements of it in particular. With more than 60 participants, the workshop introduced the concepts of the PGI group and its dependencies with GIN and other OGF working groups and their specifications. Also, the co-chairs highlighted the expected set of documents that will be the outcome of the PGI group. The workshop discussed the current state of the group and provided information about the from use cases derived infrastructure interoperability reference model, which has been given as an input to the PGI group by the GIN co-chair Morris Riedel. This model defines and points to refinements and missing links between numerous open standards and is currently reviewed for its standardization potential within PGI and forms the core building blocks of the above mentioned PGI ecosystem addressing the weaknesses of current specifications that makes them unsuitable in their current form for enabling production Grid interoperability. In addition, some of the GIN use cases have been also shown in the workshop that can take advantage of the PGI standardization activities. In the second part of the PGI workshop, representatives of many production Grid infrastructures (and their middleware providers) presented their interest and their expectations from the PGI group.
Apart from the workshop, the PGI group also conducted three working group sessions. The sessions basically discussed the process steps for PGI and clarified elements of the roadmap of the group as well as its basic use case and documents that form the outcome of the PGI group. Furthermore, a lot of time in these sessions has been used to work on the security setup within the PGI ecosystem. All in all, already discussions about the basic use case and security setups revealed that the work of PGI is non-trivial and thus requires a lot of work, not only on specifying missing links, tunings, and refinements of current versions of standards, but more notably agreeing on common elements of the larger PGI ecosystem. It’s potentially the first time in OGF history that many production Grids sit together to define a standards-based production Grid interoperability ecosystem that goes far beyond the definition of a specific architecture (i.e. OGSA) that is rather defined to specify the components within one Grid. However, as some of the people of the PGI working group keep saying, ‘also the OGSA-BES specification standard wasn’t build in a day’, the enthusiasm and commitment of members of the PGI group is high. Thus the group intends to provide outputs even this year by working closely together with experts of numerous fields (i.e. security, data, computation, and information) that participate within GIN. Working together with these experts and using the production experience gained in GIN and its use cases as major driving force, the PGI group aims to make significant progress in the next months.
After OGF25, the next steps of the PGI group are to use the input of the infrastructure interoperability reference model to define the larger PGI ecosystem and its core building blocks. While this is carried out on a longer perspective, work on the refinements and missing links is focused on the security aspects already. Therefore, Morris Riedel as one of the PGI co-chairs will participate in the next Middleware Security Group meeting in Zuerich at the end of March to check with the Grid security experts of this group whether the intended PGI security setup makes sense. In parallel, the group continues to have telephone conferences every Friday.
The Friday Center
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
May 26-29, 2009
Join the Open Grid Forum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as we return to the Friday Center for the 26th OGF event. OGF26 will focus on furthering the mission of OGF through workshops and chartered group sessions.
Registration is now open! Visit http://www.ogf.org/OGF26/ for more information regarding the event, registration, and lodging.
The 27th Open Grid Forum - OGF27
Co-located with WestGrid's Annual Conference and hosted by Cybera
The Banff Centre
Banff, Alberta, Canada
October 12-16, 2009
The week-long summit will bring together an international gathering of developers, suppliers, users and others who push the capabilities of the above-mentioned technologies. Presented as three conferences in one, this event will be one of the largest in North America to explore the tools that are changing the ways we investigate, integrate and innovate our business and research practices.
In this issue:
- OGF25 Wrapup
- Selected OGF25 Highlights
- Introduction to Production Grid Infrastructure (PGI) and OGF25 activities
- OGF26 Call for Session Proposals
- Upcoming Events
OGF25/EGEE User Forum Wrapup
Over 600 people attended the 4th EGEE User Forum/OGF25 in Catania, Italy in early March 2009. Thanks to the tireless work of people behind the scenes, particularly from EGEE and OGF-Europe and our local host INFN, the event ran smoothly and allowed the exceptional content to take center stage.“I think that OGF25 was a great success. The co-location with the EGEE User Forum results in a conference with an excellent breadth of topics and interests, so much so that it’s always hard to decide which sessions to attend! I also think that OGF25 was a success, not only as a conference, but from the point of view of the standards activities that occurred.
This was the first OGF where the Production Grid Infrastructure working group met, and they had some very successful sessions, both in terms of outreach and working sessions. We also can look forward to the formation of a couple of new working groups. The Cloud Computing API BoF attracted over 100 people, and had quite widespread interest in moving forward as a working group. Also, the workshop on Green IT resulted in the desire to form a 'CO2 working group', which will work on standards that help organizations to operate their data centres in more 'green efficient' ways.
I’m quite excited to see the birth of these new activities in OGF. It speaks to the desire of various communities of interest to work on standards and specifications within the open model that the OGF provides. I look forward to watching as these activities unfold.”
-Paul Strong, Ebay and OGF Board Member
Selected highlights from OGF25:
- Opening Keynote , Cloud and Grid Keynotes I and Keynotes II , and Grid Application Experiences Keynotes
- Production Grid Infrastructure kick-off meetings (Session I, Session II , and see below)
- GLUE 2 published as an OGF Proposed Recommendation (Session, Press Release )
- Digital Repositories Workshop
- Green-IT Workshop Session 1, Session 2, Session 3 , Session 4
- Grids to Cloud Workshop Session 1 , Session 2 , Session 3
- Cloud Computing API Bof
- All presentations/materials from all sessions
What others are saying about the event:
GridTalk Blog and PodcastsEGEE Press Releases
OGF-Europe
Introduction to Production Grid Infrastructure (PGI) and OGF25 activities
- by Morris Riedel, co-chair PGI-WGTowards the end of 2008, the OGF Grid Interoperation Now (GIN) community group started a spin-off standardization activity named Production Grid Infrastructure (PGI) working group. Both groups complement each other and thus GIN proceeds to enable real e-science applications that require resources in more than one production infrastructure demonstrating the technical feasibility of interoperability using open standards wherever possible. The PGI group complements GIN activities by embedding gained GIN experience in refinements of OGF specifications and the missing links between them. Thus the overall goal is to realize an ecosystem that consists of a set of profiles of well-known open standards already used in production (OGSA-BES, JSDL, GridFTP, SRM, GLUE2). During this process the PGI group provides feedback to the standardization groups of these standards via liaisons with them. Once the PGI ecosystem has been defined and deployed on production infrastructures the GIN group will work on demonstrating that the ecosystem works in daily production use cases that require interoperable infrastructures and may consider new emerging standards as inputs to the PGI group. Both groups GIN and PGI are supported via OGF-Europe with a secretary position.
While having already participants from production Grids such as EGEE, DEISA, NorduGrid, NAREGI and such like, OGF25 was a great chance to get an even broader range of people involved in the PGI group. Therefore, the PGI group organized a PGI workshop in close collaboration with OGF-Europe and conducted three working group sessions to work on the greater PGI ecosystem standards in general and the security elements of it in particular. With more than 60 participants, the workshop introduced the concepts of the PGI group and its dependencies with GIN and other OGF working groups and their specifications. Also, the co-chairs highlighted the expected set of documents that will be the outcome of the PGI group. The workshop discussed the current state of the group and provided information about the from use cases derived infrastructure interoperability reference model, which has been given as an input to the PGI group by the GIN co-chair Morris Riedel. This model defines and points to refinements and missing links between numerous open standards and is currently reviewed for its standardization potential within PGI and forms the core building blocks of the above mentioned PGI ecosystem addressing the weaknesses of current specifications that makes them unsuitable in their current form for enabling production Grid interoperability. In addition, some of the GIN use cases have been also shown in the workshop that can take advantage of the PGI standardization activities. In the second part of the PGI workshop, representatives of many production Grid infrastructures (and their middleware providers) presented their interest and their expectations from the PGI group.
Apart from the workshop, the PGI group also conducted three working group sessions. The sessions basically discussed the process steps for PGI and clarified elements of the roadmap of the group as well as its basic use case and documents that form the outcome of the PGI group. Furthermore, a lot of time in these sessions has been used to work on the security setup within the PGI ecosystem. All in all, already discussions about the basic use case and security setups revealed that the work of PGI is non-trivial and thus requires a lot of work, not only on specifying missing links, tunings, and refinements of current versions of standards, but more notably agreeing on common elements of the larger PGI ecosystem. It’s potentially the first time in OGF history that many production Grids sit together to define a standards-based production Grid interoperability ecosystem that goes far beyond the definition of a specific architecture (i.e. OGSA) that is rather defined to specify the components within one Grid. However, as some of the people of the PGI working group keep saying, ‘also the OGSA-BES specification standard wasn’t build in a day’, the enthusiasm and commitment of members of the PGI group is high. Thus the group intends to provide outputs even this year by working closely together with experts of numerous fields (i.e. security, data, computation, and information) that participate within GIN. Working together with these experts and using the production experience gained in GIN and its use cases as major driving force, the PGI group aims to make significant progress in the next months.
After OGF25, the next steps of the PGI group are to use the input of the infrastructure interoperability reference model to define the larger PGI ecosystem and its core building blocks. While this is carried out on a longer perspective, work on the refinements and missing links is focused on the security aspects already. Therefore, Morris Riedel as one of the PGI co-chairs will participate in the next Middleware Security Group meeting in Zuerich at the end of March to check with the Grid security experts of this group whether the intended PGI security setup makes sense. In parallel, the group continues to have telephone conferences every Friday.
Upcoming Events
The 26th Open Grid Forum - OGF26The Friday Center
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
May 26-29, 2009
Join the Open Grid Forum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as we return to the Friday Center for the 26th OGF event. OGF26 will focus on furthering the mission of OGF through workshops and chartered group sessions.
Registration is now open! Visit http://www.ogf.org/OGF26/ for more information regarding the event, registration, and lodging.
The 27th Open Grid Forum - OGF27
Co-located with WestGrid's Annual Conference and hosted by Cybera
The Banff Centre
Banff, Alberta, Canada
October 12-16, 2009
The week-long summit will bring together an international gathering of developers, suppliers, users and others who push the capabilities of the above-mentioned technologies. Presented as three conferences in one, this event will be one of the largest in North America to explore the tools that are changing the ways we investigate, integrate and innovate our business and research practices.
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