[BYTEIO-WG] Notes from OGSA ByteIO sessions at OGF21

[neil p chue hong]

OGSA-ByteIO Interoperability Fiesta results
===========================================

Present: 17 participants

The main topic of this session was reporting on the results of the ByteIO
interoperability fiesta.
These can be found here:
https://forge.ogf.org/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.byteio-wg/wiki/HomePage

Four groups participated, from University of Virginia, Fujitsu Labs of
Europe, EPCC and FZ-Juelich.

UVa and FZ-Juelich implemented both the Random and Streamable interfaces,
FLE and EPCC implemented only the Random interface.

There were a variety of environments used, from clean room to existing
systems. There were a variety of WS and XML stacks used, including Axis,
JaxWS and XFire. The implementors had varying degrees of familiarity with
the specification, some being authors and some being completely new to the
spec.

The problems to do with creating instances to use in the interop was
addressed in the Interoperability Testing Scenarios document.

A question was asked by Malcolm Atkinson and David Martin about the relative
level of effort required to implement the specification, and to complete the
interop. All participants agreed that the interop took more effort than the
spec implementation (which took between 2 days and 2 weeks). 

A question was asked by Andrew Grimshaw about whether a use case which
included security had been written, and what ByteIO's security requirements
were. Michel answered that the security requirements were closely tied to
local requirements, and so it did not make sense to generalise them.
However, it would make sense to write up some specific scenarios.

Although the wiki was used to document current status and issues, it could
also have been used to record ongoing success.

All sites experienced difficulties with differences in the tools. Particular
elements (for instance "nillable") would be interpreted differently by
different stacks. A question from Steve Newhouse commented on the fact that
all the WS implementations were open source, and whether a commercial WS
stack might have more predictable behaviour - in particular stricter
conformance to WS-I. However, Neil commented that the issues also manifested
themselves in the different XML tooling.

It was noted that the OGSA group was now looking at interop of different WS
security stacks and profiles.

The group was encouraged to do an article in Geoffrey Fox's special issue in
CCP on the interop and how ByteIO will be used in each implementation.

Use cases to take ByteIO further:

- use ByteIO to stage part of a larger file into a JSDL/BES job submission,
e.g. UNICORE, GridSAM, gLite?
- use ByteIO + RNS to created a virtualised filesystem
- use ByteIO + OGSA-DAI to allow a "non-WS" view of submitting database
queries, and providing "cat like" access to results listed as if in a
directory
- ability to do replicated ByteIO endpoints (prototyped by UVa)

It was discussed whether ByteIO should do something for SC07 - this needs to
be discussed further.

John Ehrig raised the idea of doing a press release, and would provide
support through the OGF office.
Steve Newhouse pointed out that this should make the use cases and benefit
of ByteIO clear to non-specialist readers.

Next stages for group:
- write up experiences document
- complete use case document
- encourage uptake in different middlewares and applications
- (potentially) test security enabled interop scenario
- (potentially) test for anomalies in performance and scalability
- (potentially) test implementation interoperability for transfer mechanisms
apart from "simple"


Experience Document compilation
===============================

Present: 5 participants

The template for writing up the experience reports was discussed and a
structure was agreed.

Each participating site will take a copy of the template and complete the
sections relating to individual contributions. Neil will fill out the common
and process sections, and consolidate individual contributions. When these
are complete (deadline is cob 28th October) the authors will discuss and
agree the general comments and conclusion sections.


Thanks in particular go to Michel Drescher, Andrew Grimshaw, Amy Krause, and
Shahbaz Memon for their contributions to the two sessions.

-- 
Neil P Chue Hong            | T: [+44] (0)131 650 5957
Director, OMII-UK           | F: [+44] (0)131 650 6555
Rm 2409, JCMB, Mayfield Rd. | E: N.ChueHong at epcc.ed.ac.uk
Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK      | W: http://www.omii.ac.uk      

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