From mpierce at cs.indiana.edu Mon Aug 1 21:18:05 2005 From: mpierce at cs.indiana.edu (mpierce at cs.indiana.edu) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 21:18:05 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508020218.j722I5P23742@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Marlon Pierce affiliation: Indiana University email: mpierce at cs.indiana.edu proposed_title: New Technologies for Science Portals session_type: tutorial proposed_duration: half day target_audience: technical experts, managers, users num_attendees: 20-50 abstract: We follow up on the GGF 12 portal tutorial and the GGF 14 Science Gateways workshop to review technologies for building Grid computing portals. We provide a brief introduction to Java portlet standards (JSR 168 and WSRP). We then provide overviews of the GridSphere portal container, OGCE and GridSphere grid portlets, grid portal programming APIs, and advanced portal services, including semantic metadata management. We also introduce the important new portlet-building technologies, JSF and AJAX. These should make portlets easier to build and provide a higher level of dynamic user interactivity. synopsis: The goals of this session will be to provide an overview of the current state of the art for building Java-based Grid computing portals. Our tutorial will be divided into 4 main sessions, described below. The first session will include general introductory material suitable for a general audience. The remaining sessions will discuss topics at a technical level and will require Java programming experience, knowledge of XML, and deployment/development experience with Grid technologies. Our first session will review general portal technology and architecture. The importance of standard-compliant Grid portlets, which we described in the GGF 12 tutorial, has been amply illustrated at the GGF 14 Science Gateways workshop. We wish to follow up on this workshop by providing a nuts-and-bolts overview of the relevant Java standards. Sample material is available from http://www.servogrid.org/slide/GEM/NMI/OGCE2TutorialMaterial/. Our second session will review new technologies for Grid portal building. Several important developments have taken place since our last tutorial. These include the release of Globus Toolkit 4, the maturation of portlet-building technologies such as Java Server Faces (JSF), and the emergence of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), used notably by Google Maps. We will therefore cover Grid portlet-building APIs, such as the Java CoG kit and GridSphere, which provide abstraction layers over different Grid toolkits. We will also examine efforts to build reusable portlet components using such technologies as JSF, which provide an important simplification to portlet construction. Portlets built using AJAX approaches similarly promise to greatly enhance the user interactivity that portlets can provide, allowing us to build much more sophisticated Grid portal interfaces. Our third session will review advanced portal services. We will examine two exemplar services in some detail. The first service will examine the problem of content and scientific data management using Grid and Semantic Web technologies. We will base this discussion on the NCSA Tupelo system. The second half of this session will examine science application support services such as the Indiana University Application Factory service. In our final session, we will examine the problem of portal testing. We will review available tools for both unit testing (such as HttpUnit) and load/stress testing (such as JMeter) and provide examples for their use. This tutorial will involve participation from a number of GCE members, including members of the Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE) group, the GridSphere team, and developers of TeraGrid Science Gateways. GGF and supplemental mailing list announcements (such as to the TeraGrid community) will provide minimum outreach. We welcome additional outreach support and recommendations. tech_requirements: No special requirements. prereq_participants: Knowledge of Java programming and general Grid computing. advertise_suggestion: The sessions may be announced using GGF and other mailing lists, such as announcements to TeraGrid mailing lists. From lfm at psc.edu Fri Aug 5 16:27:04 2005 From: lfm at psc.edu (lfm at psc.edu) Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 16:27:04 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508052127.j75LR4B21020@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Laura McGinnis affiliation: PGS-RG email: lfm at psc.edu proposed_title: Campus Grids session_type: Workshop proposed_duration: Full Day target_audience: Managers, Implementers, Deployment Strategists num_attendees: 50-100 abstract: Various grid communities have indicated the need for a full day of case studies from campus grid sites, describing their grids. The cases that will be presented should discuss how the grid came about, how they got funding and executive buy-in/support, what it\'s used for, etc. Each speaker will have a good block of time to present their grid, but the definition of \"campus\" is fairly broad. \"Campus\" may include enterprise and commercial grids, if they can demonstrate a campus-type perspective (rather than special-purpose only grids). synopsis: GGF15 Workshop Proposal ? Campus Grids Workshop Description: PGS-RG (Production Grid Services) is looking to sponsor a full day of case studies from campus grid sites, describing their grids. Harvard (Jayanta Sircar) has offered to host this workshop on their campus, probably on Sunday, 2-October. The cases that will be presented should discuss how the grid came about, how they got funding and executive buy-in/support, what it\'s used for, etc. We want to give each speaker a good block of time to present their grid, but we\'re pretty open about how the presenters define \"campus\". This leaves us open to include enterprise and commercial grids, if they can demonstrate a campus-type perspective (rather than special-purpose only grids). The full-day timeframe should give each grid 30-45 minutes to present their case study. To follow up, then, we\'d like to host a series of panels at GGF15, to talk about commonalities across the grids - formation methodologies, recruiting applications, best/common practices, lessons learned & pitfalls, etc. The pre-GGF workshop talks should be pretty parallel; the panels at GGF would then cut across all of the grids, but addressing different issues in more detail. We want to get a good cross-section not only of presentations, but also of participants, so part of the workshop planning will have to include outreach to campuses that might not traditionally attend GGF meetings. a) When you want meeting and how long: We are proposing a full-day workshop on Sunday, 2 October 2005, the day before GGF15 opens. To facilitate logistics, Jayanta Sircar of Harvard University has offered to host the workshop on Harvard?s campus. This is close enough to the GGF venue that hotels and transportation should not be adversely complicated. We would request that GGF arrange for the conference rate at the hotels to include Saturday 1-October and Sunday, 2-October, to accommodate workshop participants. b) How we or you advertise/estimate of interest: The calls for submissions and participation should be extended to all GGF members as well as sites involved in providing campus grids to their populations. A Call for Presentations should be extended via the GGF mailing lists, as well as other HPC and Grid media, in particularly HPCWire and GridToday. The CFP should also be sent to the Supercomputing (SCxx) and EDUCAUSE communities, to broaden the pool of contributions and participants. We anticipate 50-100 attendees, based on past workshop experiences and the initial interest expressed for this topic. c) Related meetings: In addition to the workshop prior to the opening of GGF, we would like to present a summary of the workshop at GGF and host a series of open discussions, for workshop participants to discuss in more detail specific aspects of providing production-quality campus grids. d) Publication: The presentations and followup discussions will be summarized into a GGF informational document. A summary web page will be made available on the PGS-RG website, including 1) Metadata about meeting (abstract etc.) 2) Presentations 3) Links to useful resources 4) Comments on discussions Further methods of disseminating workshop material and establishing a campus grids community may also be proposed as followup from the open discussions that will be held during the GGF conference. In particular, the workshop committee will be alert for opportunities to propose BOFs for later GGF meetings. e) Workshop Committee: ? Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Chicago, GGF External Advisory Committee - foster at mcs.anl.gov ? Geoffrey Fox, University of Indiana, AD, Community Affairs - gcf at cs.indiana.edu ? Laura McGinnis, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Co-chair PGS-RG ? lfm at psc.edu ? Jayanta Sircar, Harvard University ? jsircar at harvard.edu ? Judith Utley, Old Dominion University, Co-chair PGS-RG ? jputley at earthlink.net ? David Wallom, Bristol University, Co-chair PGS-RG ? david.wallom at bristol.ac.uk The proposal review committee will be identified later. tech_requirements: none prereq_participants: none advertise_suggestion: The calls for submissions and participation should be extended to all GGF members as well as sites involved in providing campus grids to their populations. A Call for Presentations should be extended via the GGF mailing lists, as well as other HPC and Grid media, in particularly HPCWire and GridToday. The CFP should also be sent to the Supercomputing (SCxx) and EDUCAUSE communities, to broaden the pool of contributions and participants. From adm35 at georgetown.edu Mon Aug 8 12:07:34 2005 From: adm35 at georgetown.edu (adm35 at georgetown.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 12:07:34 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508081707.j78H7YP09359@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Arnie Miles affiliation: Georgetown University email: adm35 at georgetown.edu proposed_title: Condor-Shib: Connecting the Upper and Lower Layers of the Middleware Stack in Computational Grids session_type: Individual presentation, followed by a demonstration proposed_duration: 60 minutes target_audience: Managers and Technical Experts num_attendees: 30? abstract: Scalable control of resource access is an impediment to a true global grid infrastructure. Extant tools that advertise and expose computational resources lack the scalable access controls that allow role-based authentication - and subsequent authorization - across administrative boundaries. Georgetown University and the University of Wisconsin have teamed to create Condor-Shib, a product that will enable user authorization to resources based upon the varied attributes of individual users. By locally identifying individuals and assigning attributes, Condor-Shib will provide controlled access necessary for large computational grids. The proposed presentation debuts and details the Condor-Shib project. synopsis: Overview: Ref URL: http://141.161.231.225/CondorShib/index.html Growing computational demands of researchers require greater access to increasing amounts of computing power. Condor addresses this need by providing a scalable, customized job scheduler capable of control over various computing systems ranging from Beowulf clusters to desktop PCs and complete compatibility with resources managed by Globus. Condor\'s \"flocking\" technology allows multiple Condor installations to work together to complete large job orders. The merger of Condor and Shibboleth will create a scheduler software package capable of consuming roles attributes in a framework that allows rapid, scalable control of the utilization of computational resources for collaborations that span administrative domains. This coupling of Condor flocks encourages inter-realm computational scenarios, increasing access to idle computational resources. The current state of grid technology allows government, industry, and academic institutions to stand up their own grids. Connecting these grids requires a high level of human intervention, with no mechanisms available for joining disparate administrative domains together. Remote sites can be connected together under a single administrative domain or if access control is not a concern. However, connecting disparate domains requires someone willing to manually enter individual names of resources allowed to access other resources into a grid map file, and map these names to local services on each resource involved. The Condor Project develops, implements, deploys, and evaluates mechanisms and policies that support High Throughput Computing (HTC) on large collections of distributively owned computing resources. Guided by both the technological and sociological challenges of such a computing environment, the Condor Team has been building software tools that enable scientists and engineers to increase their computing throughput. Shibboleth, a project of Internet2/MACE, is developing architectures, policy structures, practical technologies, and an open source implementation to support inter-institutional sharing of web resources subject to access controls. Shibboleth will develop a policy framework that will allow inter-operation within the higher education community. Shibboleth is an open source project that provides federated administration, access control based on attributes, active management of privacy, and a framework for multiple, scalable trust and policy sets, called federations. Shibboleth complements Condor by creating a customizable, secured access point that can define any desired set of user parameters to regulate user priority, access time and resource usage, and securely make those parameters available to cooperating institutions. Session Goals: The primary goal is to debut and demonstrate how the Condor-Shibboleth project, combined with a hierarchical global infrastructure, will resolve the scalability problems troubling current grid technologies. We will start with a brief overview of Condor and Shibboleth (referenced below), followed by respective values this merger brings to the grid space. The demonstration component of our presentation will include examples of access control files and job submission files, a description of our test environment, and finally an example of submitting a job to the grid and monitoring its progress. We will end the presentation with an open discussion on suggestions and criticisms of our approach to solving the authorization problems via Condor-Shib. Will our product solve scalability problems troubling current grid technologies? Until these problems are resolved, will there always be a difference between \'A\' grid and \'THE\' grid? References: The Condor-Shib team University of Wisconsin Miron Livny, Professor of Computer Science and Condor Project Lead Todd Tannenbaum, Manager of Condor Development Staff Ian Alderman, Researcher of Data Security for Condor team Georgetown University Charlie Leonhardt, Chief Technologist Chad La Joie, Team Leader (Presenter) Brent Putman, Programmer Steve Moore Director, Advanced Research Computing Arnie Miles, Senior Systems Architect (Presenter) Jess Cannata, Systems Administrator Nick Marcou, Systems Administrator Internet 2 Ken Klingenstein, Director of the Internet2 Middleware Initiative Mike McGill, Program Manager for the Internet2 Health Sciences Initiative tech_requirements: Internet access and data projector. prereq_participants: None advertise_suggestion: This project has a high level of interest and support from Internet2. We will be demonstrating early stages of this to the Internet2 team in September in prepartion for a National Science Foundation proposal. We anticipate a large, receptive audience once I2 and NSF publicly express their support. From lajoie at georgetown.edu Tue Aug 9 07:07:33 2005 From: lajoie at georgetown.edu (lajoie at georgetown.edu) Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2005 07:07:33 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508091207.j79C7Xk24205@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Chad La Joie affiliation: Georgetown University/Internet2 email: lajoie at georgetown.edu proposed_title: User Management and Access Control within the Grid session_type: Presentation w/ Q&A proposed_duration: 60 minutes target_audience: managers, developers num_attendees: unknown abstract: Grid toolkits enable rich fabrics of resources to be used together but only provider simplistic authentication and access control mechanism. This talk will focus on how new and emerging identity management and access control technologies and standards can help produce more secure, manageable, and scalable grid systems. synopsis: This talk will focus on two main areas: * Mechanisms for authenticating and collecting identity attributes for users. Special attention will be given to protecting users\' credentials, securely and selectively making their identity attributes available to a service, and building a strong fabric of trust between services and identity holders. * Using an individual\'s identity information within an attribute-based authorization infrastructure that provides more expressive access control policies for services. Tools for managing these access policies outside of, and across, services will be presented. After each of these areas is explored a case will be made that such an infrastructure will reduce the complexity of interacting with grids, for the user, and ease management of them for administrators. A use case will be presented demonstrating how some of the technologies and standards covered in the talk have produced noticeable gains in administration. Finally, the talk will wrap up with suggestion on steps that might be taken to move forward and then questions and answers. This talk will not be highly technical but attendees should have a basic understanding of XML, HTTP, and the web services concept. tech_requirements: prereq_participants: Basic understanding of XML, HTTP, web services, and an identity management system (such as LDAP, Active Directory, Novell, etc) advertise_suggestion: From childers at mcs.anl.gov Fri Aug 12 09:20:14 2005 From: childers at mcs.anl.gov (childers at mcs.anl.gov) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:20:14 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508121420.j7CEKE602243@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Lisa Childers affiliation: The Globus Alliance email: childers at mcs.anl.gov proposed_title: Building a Java Grid Service Using The Globus Toolkit v.4 session_type: tutorial proposed_duration: 1/2 day target_audience: developers num_attendees: 50 abstract: This half-day tutorial is designed to teach developers how to build a Java Service using the Globus Toolkit (GT4). The Globus Toolkit is the flagship product of the Globus Alliance, which produces open source middleware used in building grids around the world. The tutorial is organized as a series of hands-on exercises in which students add increasing functionality to a skeletal service implementation. Fundamental patterns and interactions of Grid computing are highlighted. The course is geared toward developers who want to learn about the newest work of the Globus Alliance and how to apply fundamental concepts in Grid computing. synopsis: Important Notes Tutorial participants must bring their own network-enabled laptops pre-loaded with a small set of open-source software. There will be no support available to debug problems with attendee laptops. A list of prerequisites for the tutorial is published at: http://www-unix.globus.org/tutorials/toolkit/BAS/GW2005/index.html. Attendees must be able to run all the software listed in the prerequisites in order to participate in the tutorial. Tutorial Prerequisites Basic knowledge of Web Services and Grid computing Knowledge of java, XML and WSDL Laptop configuration: jakarta ant 1.5 or 1.6 jdk 1.4.2 802.11b wireless capability required VMware emulation not supported Cygwin is not supported Firewall software must be disabled Windows ME/95/98 is not supported. Regarding other OSes: if you can run the jdk and ant you should be ok A GT-specific distribution: [to be made available the day of the tutorial] A software bundle containing tutorial-specific course material: [to be made available the day of the tutorial] Optional: An editor that highlights Java and XML files, such as JEdit. You also may find that Adobe Reader will come in handy. Note! It is the attendees\' responsibility to insure that their networking, ant and jdk are configured and working properly prior to the tutorial. The integrity of ant/jdk installations can be verified by building this sample code: Linux version or MS Windows version. tech_requirements: prereq_participants: see above advertise_suggestion: From m.j.leese at dl.ac.uk Fri Aug 12 10:49:20 2005 From: m.j.leese at dl.ac.uk (m.j.leese at dl.ac.uk) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 10:49:20 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508121549.j7CFnKx04202@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Mark Leese affiliation: CCLRC - Daresbury Laboratory email: m.j.leese at dl.ac.uk proposed_title: Use of Web Services for NM Applications session_type: Extended individual presentation, followed by Q&A and discussion session proposed_duration: half-day target_audience: Novice/intermediate WS developers, technical managers num_attendees: 10 from NM-WG abstract: Marlon Pierce from the Community Grids Lab at Indiana University will present an overview of Web Services, covering both the basics of the technology and describing the steps required to make a generic service available as a Web Service. To allow detailed WS questions, Marlon will then lead an open Q&A, before participating with NM-WG in a discussion of how Web Services can best be applied in the NM problem space to facilitate the collection and publication of NM data. The session is aimed at anyone seeking to reinforce or expand their Web Services knowledge, or make use of the NM-WG schemata. synopsis: The session is being organised in response to a clear NM-WG need, but may be applicable to other GGF/GridWorld participants, such as other RG/WGs in the Infrastructure area, where development of Web Services is not the core business of the group. In the last 12-18 months NM-WG have been developing and trialling means for automating requests for the collection of network measurement data, and the subsequent publication of that data. While the group has varied WS exposure, active group participants are in the main networking experts not software engineers, and need assistance in fast tracking development of their WS expertise so as to not distract from the group\'s core objectives. To this end, Marlon Pierce from the Community Grids Lab at Indiana University has been recruited to participate in a half-day session designed to give some members the thorough overview they need (i.e. with detail beyond the common WS \"stock quote\" examples) whilst providing more proficient members with the opportunity to ask detailed and perhaps lengthy questions. In more detail, the session will consist of: 1. Web Services overview (2-3 hrs) - overview of relevant terminology, concepts and techniques, in particular WSDL, SOAP bindings and notification services - case study: e.g. some arbitrary group has a database of data and XML schemas for requesting the data and returning it in an agreed format. How does the group take those items and turn them into a working, deployed Web Service - what are the steps involved? 2. Open Q&A (0.75 hrs) 3. Discussion (1 hr) - how can Web Services be best applied in the NM problem space to facilitate the collection and publication of NM data? In summary the session is aimed at anyone who feels that they need more Web Services knowledge, and will aim to give a thorough overview of Web Services, whilst allowing participants to ask detailed (and perhaps lengthy) questions. tech_requirements: One port of wired network access. prereq_participants: A basic understanding of XML. An appreciation of the top-level principles of Web Services would be helpful, e.g. Web Services communicate via XML (with different SOAP bindings available), WSDL defines the interfaces into/out of a Web Service etc. advertise_suggestion: Email would seem the best form of advertising to GGF, either targeted at specific groups (e.g. using the Infrastructure area mailing list) or open to the wider GGF community (e.g. mentioned in the pre-GGF emails frequently sent to wg-all at ggf.org and grid-announce at ggf.org). Any additional advertising required for GridWorld is not an area I\'m familiar with. From a.krause at epcc.ed.ac.uk Fri Aug 12 11:05:04 2005 From: a.krause at epcc.ed.ac.uk (a.krause at epcc.ed.ac.uk) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 11:05:04 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508121605.j7CG54504518@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Amy Krause affiliation: EPCC email: a.krause at epcc.ed.ac.uk proposed_title: OGSA-DAI Tutorial session_type: Tutorial proposed_duration: 2 - 3 hours target_audience: Project managers and technical architects looking for technologies to solve data access and integration problems; and developers interested in exposing data resources to the Grid num_attendees: abstract: OGSA-DAI is a widely used piece of middleware used to access data sources within Grids. This tutorial will give a general introduction to OGSA-DAI presenting: o Data access and integration requirements for Grids. o How OGSA-DAI aims to satisfy some of these requirements. o An overview of the OGSA-DAI architecture. o OGSA-DAI extensibility points. o How OGSA-DAI is being used in other projects. By the end of the tutorial the attendees should have a strong understanding of how OGSA-DAI works and how they may subsequently be able to use it to meet their own data access requirements within Grids. synopsis: The UK based OGSA-DAI (Open Grid Service Architecture - Data Access and Integration) project is producing middleware to access and integrate data source using web service in Grid environments. OGSA-DAI is already being used by a number of large projects both within the US and UK to satisfy their data access and integration requirements. In addition to this the OGSA-DAI project is working in close collaboration with other major Grid middleware providers, such as Globus and the UK OMII, to ensure that OGSA-DAI integrates seamlessly with their products. OGSA-DAI currently supports access to data held in various types of data sources such as relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, SQLServer), data in XML repositories (Xindice), and data in flat files (SwissProt, OMIM). These are just the officially supported databases - OGSA-DAI has also been shown to work with other databases such as eXist. Data integration capabilities are also available through OGSA-DQP (Distributed Query Processing), middleware currently layered on top of OGSA-DAI but which will be more closely integrated within OGSA-DAI in the near future. An introduction will be given to some of the underlying design principles used in OGSA-DAI, the functional capabilities of OGSA-DAI services, the architectural framework in which these currently operate and some future directions. It is unlikely that all functional requirements for a given project could be met by the base distribution hence the OGSA-DAI architecture has been designed to be highly extensible. These extensibility points and how they may be exploited will be presented. OGSA-DAI has been around for about 3 years now and in this time has released six major and three minor distributions. After each of these release a dialogue has entered into with users to determine their future requirements and how they are currently using OGSA-DAI. This has allowed the middleware to develop in a way that attempts to take into account actual usage practice and has informed the OGSA-DAI developers as to how the software is actually being used in the field. Some of these real use cases will be shown in this presentation. For more details, visit the project website at http://www.ogsadai.org.uk. By the end of this tutorial attendees should have: o An understanding of what some of the data access and integration requirements for applications on the Grid are and the possible solutions to achieve this. o Background knowledge of what OGSA-DAI is, what its scope is and its relationship to other Grid middleware efforts is. o Understand the OGSA-DAI architecture and how it can be extended. tech_requirements: prereq_participants: advertise_suggestion: From mpierce at cs.indiana.edu Fri Aug 12 12:11:33 2005 From: mpierce at cs.indiana.edu (mpierce at cs.indiana.edu) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:11:33 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508121711.j7CHBXm15080@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Marlon Pierce affiliation: Indiana University email: mpierce at cs.indiana.edu proposed_title: Building Geographical Information System Grids session_type: Community forum proposed_duration: 1/2 day target_audience: Application scientists, technical experts, managers num_attendees: 10-25 abstract: Geographical information systems (GIS) are beginning to play a prominent role in many Grid systems, including GEON, LAITS, LEAD, SERVOGrid, SCOOPs, and sever other efforts. We propose to assemble a community forum that will include overview presentations and discussion from the aforementioned groups. The purpose of this forum will be to increase awareness of GIS Grids and collaboration in community projects. Participants will be invited to submit publications to a special issue of refereed journal. synopsis: Geographical information systems (GIS) are beginning to play a prominent role in many Grid systems, including GEON, LAITS, LEAD, SERVOGrid, SCOOPs, and sever other efforts. We propose to assemble a community forum that will include overview presentations and discussion from the aforementioned groups. The purpose of this forum will be to increase awareness of GIS Grids and collaboration in community projects. Participants will be invited to submit publications to a special issue of refereed journal. Our goal in this forum is to focus on Grid and scientific computing requirements for GIS systems. We will solicit participation from the Grid community members listed above, and we will also put out a general call for participation to the Grid community. Discussions of the applicability of various standards and software (such as from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and ESRI, respectively) will be part of the forum discussions. The format of the meeting will be 30 minute indvidual presentations from representative projects, followed by 1-2 panel discussions. The community forum is best advertised through emails to appropriate GGF and other mailing lists. The forum organizers will also extend personal invitations to appropriate groups. The example participant projects all include active GGF members, so we anticipate sufficient minimum participation. We will also make efforts to contact relevent external groups, such as the OGC. tech_requirements: Only standard a/v equipment is required. prereq_participants: Participants should have some general familiarity with GIS systems. advertise_suggestion: Mailing lists and web sites. From adm35 at georgetown.edu Fri Aug 12 12:31:52 2005 From: adm35 at georgetown.edu (adm35 at georgetown.edu) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:31:52 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508121731.j7CHVqh32597@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Arnie Miles affiliation: Georgetown University email: adm35 at georgetown.edu proposed_title: Globus and OGSA-DAI in practice: A report from Georgetown University on participation in the National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics caBIG project Architecture workspace, with a live demonstration of the caBIG grid. session_type: Individual with Demo proposed_duration: 60 minutes target_audience: Managers and Technical Experts. Discussion will be geared towards the life sciences, but the impact of the technologies used applies to a wider audience. num_attendees: 30? abstract: The caBIG project of the National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics is an effort to establish a data and analytical grid between several dozen cancer centers around the country. Georgetown?s participation in the project has been multifaceted, and this presentation will cover three things. First, we will discuss our experience in the ?cross-cutting? architectural workspace generally. Then, the architecture of the production reference will be covered, focusing on how and why ?off-the-shelf? products like Globus and OGSA-DAI were selected as infrastructure elements. Finally, we will detail the work done to set up and run a grid-node, and using the grid-enabled caArray application, we will submit live queries to the grid, demonstrating various ways it can be used be scientists right now. synopsis: The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG ? sponsored by the National Cancer Institute\'s Center for Bioinformatics. will enable the sharing of cancer research data and tools by connecting individuals and institutions in the grid space. The caBIG goal is to speed the delivery of innovative approaches for the prevention and treatment of cancer. The infrastructure and tools created by caBIG also have broad utility outside the cancer community. In this proposed one hour presentation, we will discuss the current state of all caBIG project grid work, with an emphasis (demonstration) on the caARRAY medical application. As a member of the caBIG Architectural Working Group, GU is the initial adopter of the caGRID tools for the microarray database caArray. These tools add the ability to address objects to the standard OGSA-DAI framework. Georgetown University has now successfully connected two instances of caArray together using the caGRID tools, and will be demonstrating this technology, as well as discussing the path to this success and the lessons learned to the Architectural Working Group on August 17. The GU team is one of the first adopters of the new National Cancer Institute caGRID 0.5, and has connected a local instance of the Microarray database caARRAY to an instance at the National Cancer Institute. We have also connected the Proteomics resource PIR to caGRID 0.5, and are working on connecting this microarray technology to clinical trials and proteomics databases on the caGRID. GU?s Advanced Research Computing team has been selected to create the new grid portal, which will allow researchers to consume all the grid-enabled resources that NCI, and all other caBIG members are creating and connecting to caGRID. Arumani Manisundaram is the project manager for the Architectural Working Group, and will be working closely with Arnie Miles, project manager for Georgetown\'s participation in caBIG and Colin Freas, database programmer to present an overview of the current state of caGRID. This discussion will briefly recap the presentation Arumani made at GGF14, to refresh the memories of those who were attendance then, and build upon his presentation to bring the audience up to date with what is the premier grid project in the life sciences world today. We will discuss how Globus and OGSA-DAI have been employed and extended to allow the advertisement of objects to a grid framework. Prior to NCI\'s involvement, OGSA-DAI was only able to expose relational databases and flat files, the sharing of objects on the grid is an important addition to the grid world. All data sources in caBIG are based on object models. We will continue to discuss some of the more esoteric requirements of standing up a complex grid environment, including semantics and identifiers issues, and how NCI has addressed these issues. To be able to share data across such a diverse environment, it is necessary to agree upon a language to describe our objects, as well as a thesaurus to serve as a reference. A mechanism also has to be in place to identify objects, discovering multiple instances of an object accurately, with associated provinance. A demonstration of the state of caGRID at that moment in time will be given. Development is steady and on-going, so it\'s hard to predict exactly what will be demonstrated, but at a minimum we will show for the first time outside the caBIG project a demonstration of the grid-enabled caARRAY application for exposing microarray experiments. No presentation of this nature would be complete unless it included a summary of lessons learned in the process. There have been many stumbling blocks along the way, and we will close our presentation with a discussion of some of the obstacles that would apply in the larger grid world. This presentation will be relevant to anyone working in medical research, but the importance of this extends far beyond medical research. The caBIG model used in the creation of this massive grid project directly should relate to any organization with widely disparate data sharing needs. Our presentation will be sufficiently lay to keep the attention of non-technical management who have data problems to solve, while having sufficient content to engage technical experts who want to satisfy data grid needs. tech_requirements: Internet access and data projector. prereq_participants: None advertise_suggestion: This will be openly discussed on the caBIG mailing lists, and could be posted to Bioinformatics lists. From yaronh at voltaire.com Fri Aug 12 15:19:14 2005 From: yaronh at voltaire.com (yaronh at voltaire.com) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:19:14 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508122019.j7CKJEY04547@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Yaron Haviv affiliation: Voltaire email: yaronh at voltaire.com proposed_title: Provisioning & Managing Switching Infrastructure as a Grid Resource session_type: Individual presentation proposed_duration: 60 minutes target_audience: Grid users that intend to deploy commercial/enterprise applications; Grid architects defining and building solutions; Switching infrastructure providers targeting grid applications num_attendees: 75 abstract: Recently, grid computing has started to enter the commercial/enterprise markets with production deployments. Previously, most of the focus in grid technologies has been on distributing compute power across multiple machines. With the entry of grid technologies into commercial and enterprise environments, there is a need to provision and manage switching infrastructure as a grid resource and to dynamically provision network environments to meet the grid application scenarios/requirements. The session will address the following: * How the hardware infrastructure and specifically network and SAN switches can be abstracted as grid resources * Modeling of the switching infrastructure and the network/SAN topologies * Integration of switching in the overall grid resource management framework * How switching infrastructure can be virtualized to dynamically form different network topologies and relations, including practical examples * Using InfiniBand-enabled switches to virtualize the server networking environment * Grid-enabled switches and using WS-RF API for grid-enabled switches Attendees will learn how switching can be integrated as part of the grid framework and how switches can be provisioned as another element in the grid resource framework. synopsis: The session will address the following: * How the hardware infrastructure and specifically network and SAN switches can be abstracted as grid resources * Modeling of the switching infrastructure and the network/SAN topologies * Integration of switching in the overall grid resource management framework * How switching infrastructure can be virtualized to dynamically form different network topologies and relations, including practical examples * Using InfiniBand-enabled switches to virtualize the server networking environment * Grid-enabled switches and using WS-RF API for grid-enabled switches tech_requirements: standard A/V only prereq_participants: knowledge of switching infrastructure considerations advertise_suggestion: Voltaire customer newsletter, Voltaire web site, IBTA Web site, GGF email list From vwelch at ncsa.uiuc.edu Fri Aug 12 15:31:33 2005 From: vwelch at ncsa.uiuc.edu (vwelch at ncsa.uiuc.edu) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:31:33 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508122031.j7CKVXg05303@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Von Welch affiliation: NCSA email: vwelch at ncsa.uiuc.edu proposed_title: Leveraging Site Infrastructute for Multi-Site Grids session_type: Workshop proposed_duration: Full day target_audience: Technical experts num_attendees: 50 abstract: Deployment of production grids involved the establishment of an increasing number of services (e.g. authentication, authorization, directory). This requirement raises the bar for establishing a Grid significantly. However the establishment of services by existing organizations has shown some promise ? for example DOE?s PKI and Kerberos-based PKIs at Fermilab and USC. And campus infrastructures are increasingly deploying outward-facing infrastructure such as Shibboleth. In this workshop we will explore the how Grids spanning multiple sites can benefit from increased leveraging of the infrastructure of those sites. We will consider both traditional high-performance computing sites as well as other types of institutions such as academic campuses. synopsis: Virtual organizations (VOs) need a variety of information services to provide their structure. For example, it is typical for a Grid to have a certificate authority to provide identity information, an attribute authority to provide information regarding the roles of their users and a resource directory that provides an enumeration of the resources available to the VO. When a VO spans a number of underlying organizations (as opposed to a Grid deployed at a single campus), the best practice today is for the VO to establish their own services to enable its day-to-day functioning. Deploying and operating these services in a security, reliable manner is non-trivial, especially for small to medium virtual organizations, particularly when one considers that these services have a number of security implications in terms of being consulted as part of authorization decisions by end resources. However, there have been some steps in the Grid community to allow for these services to be provided by leveraging and federation the services already provided by the sites on which the VO is based. For example, Fermilab provides a Kerberos CA allowing other sites in a VO to base their Grid authentication on the Kerberos authentication infrastructure already deployed at Fermilab. And campus infrastructures are increasingly deploying outward-facing infrastructure such as Shibboleth. In this workshop we will explore the how VOs spanning multiple sites can benefit from increased leveraging of the infrastructure of those sites. We will consider both traditional high-performance computing sites as well as other types of institutions such as academic campuses. We will also explore some of the challenges involved in this model, for example: ? There are no ubiquitous standards for site authentication, attribute, directory, etc. infrastructure. This implies that we need translation mechanisms to achieve interoperability. What translation mechanisms exist today and how well to they work? ? While some information that sites can provide, such as identifiers for authentication, is generic and can be easily consumed by a VO, the VO may need to define other strucuture, such as roles for its users, which is not something sites possess today. How can a VO define this information, while still using the site infrastructures to propagate it? ? Many sites have privacy concerns regarding information about their users. How can sites share information with VOs while addressing these concerns? The workshop plans to produce an informational document capturing the following: ? List of current success stories for leveraging site infrastructure to form multi-site VOs; ? Enumeration of existing tools, APIs, standards and technologies for leveraging site infrastructure; ? Current barriers to leveraging of multiple site infrastructures by VOs. Workshop organizers: Tom Barton, Jim Basney, Steven Carmody, Ken Klingensten, Frank Siebenlist, Von Welch and others TBD. Outline: The workshop will have a number of invited speakers, who will present attempts to address the challenges described previously (an initial list is give below and we will also produce a call to the community for additional presenters). The goal of each presenter will be to solicit feedback from the audience in regards to how well a particular solution does or does not meet the challenge from their point of view. Ample time will be allowed for discussion. Preliminary speak list: ? Ken Klingensten ? Campus IT ? Von Welch ? Shibboleth for Grids ? Jim Basney ? MyProxy/LTER/NFC/NERSC ? Tom Barton ? Signet/Grouper ? TBD (Dane Skow?) ? Kerberos CA ? Someone from IU or TeraGrid to discuss their Grid Operations Center/HelpDesk? ? Condor-Shib? Marketing plan: The organizers are involved in GGF security working groups and activities related to this activity such as TeraGrid and Internet2. We will reach out to the constituency of those groups, plus other groups we believe will be interested, such as OSG and the EU Grid efforts. tech_requirements: None prereq_participants: Basic understanding of virtual organizations and security advertise_suggestion: Related technical and security-oriented lists for GGF, Internet2, and large Grid projects (TeraGrid, OSG, etc.) From kchiu at cs.binghamton.edu Sat Aug 13 02:33:34 2005 From: kchiu at cs.binghamton.edu (kchiu at cs.binghamton.edu) Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 02:33:34 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508130733.j7D7XYA14652@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Kenneth Chiu and Yuichi Nakamura affiliation: SUNY Binghamton and IBM Tokyo Research, respectively email: kchiu at cs.binghamton.edu proposed_title: Web Services Performance: Issues and Research session_type: Half-day workshop proposed_duration: Half-day target_audience: Managers, users, developers, architects, technical experts, researchers num_attendees: 20-40 abstract: The convergence of Web services with Grid computing has brought significant benefits. Lingering performance concerns of Web services, however, threaten to slow the adoption of Grid services, and limit its penetration into the cyberinfrastructure. Research avenues that may contribute to addressing the performance issue include advanced parsing techniques, alternative binary encodings of XML, and streaming XML processors to address memory usage. This half-day workshop seeks to foster discussion of these issues by bringing together researchers and application developers, and also to discuss metaquestions such as whether or not performance concerns are valid, and if so, what is the impact. synopsis: The convergence of service-oriented computing and Grid computing has led to the wide acceptance of Web services as the standard communication mechanism in Grid computing. This has brought the benefits of improved interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and has allowed Grid computing researchers and developers to leverage the substantial efforts of the wider Web services community. Performance, however, has been a lingering concern of Web services. Common implementations of Web services have developed reputations, deserved or not, for being slow and memory-intensive; or in some cases simply unable to handle large messages. Secure web services must also contend with XML canonicalization, XPath query computations, and cryptographic computations. The performance issues have been attributed variously to underlying causes such as the inherent verbosity of XML, the costs of converting floating-point numbers from the native machine representation to a text format, and the proliferation of DOM-based trees in XML processing streams. The perceived inefficiences have slowed the adoption of Web services, and limited its use to communications deemed not performance-sensitive. Performance sensitive data and communications are then conveyed using mechanisms, often ad hoc, proprietary, or binary-based, that are considered more efficient. This has two disadvantages. First, it prevents the benefits of Web services from penetrating deeply into the information infrastructure. For example, semantic mediation is a technique which can be used to address data compatibility issues, but works best with XML-based data. Data format description languages can be used to reconcile semantic mediation with arbitrary data formats, but introduces another layer of complexity. Second, it prevents a single, standard data model and terminology from being adopted throughout. One set of concepts and models is required for Web services, and another is required for the high-performance technologies. For example, binary attachments can be used in SOAP to convey scientific data, but that scientific data then requires understanding another type system to interpret the contents. If Web services were efficient enough, sending the data directly in the Web service as XML may simplify the overall architecture and improve the interoperability of scientific data. These issues are increasingly important as we seek to improve scientific data management, provenance, and compatibility issues. A number of different avenues of research may contribute to addressing Web services performance. Improved XML parsing may alleviate some bottlenecks. Streaming approaches may address other issues, such as memory footprint. Benchmark suites might help focus research and separate myths from reality. Alternate binary encodings of XML may address XML verbosity and numeric conversion issues. Goals of Session ---------------- The goal of this session is to foster discussion on these research directions, and metaquestions such as when Web services performance is a problem, the impact of Web services performance issues, and even whether or not Web services performance is an actual problem. We hope to draw an audience consisting of researchers in Web services performance, and application developers and architects who are developing production Grid systems. Target Audience --------------- The target audience for this workshop is architects, developers, and engineers of production Grid systems; and researchers in Web services performance. This includes the following communities: - researchers and developers in XML/Web services performance, developers of parsing tools, XSLT/XPath performance optimisers, and SOAP engines - researchers and application developers in Grid computing, utility computing and on-demand computing, especially those based on service-oriented software architecture and web service technologies - engineers and developers from industries/businesses who think about using Web services or have used Web services but are concerned about performance or have experienced performance problems - researchers and specialists in performance and measurement who have studied performance issues in Web services technologies Potential Attendees ------------------- XML performance: there is a very active industrial and academic community of researchers and developers of XML performance tools and optimisers, including organiser Y. Nakamura. This group of people is a main target for participation, including people from IBM, Airbus, smaller software companies, and academia such as Karlsruhe, INRIA, University of Pennsylvania, etc. Grid and other Web service application areas: the Global Grid Forum and industries such as HP and IBM heavily push service-oriented computing, but often have linger-ing doubts about performance of the solutions. We expect interest from researchers and developers of these cutting edge applications, including ondemand, utility, en-terprise integration and business-to-business applications, and organisor K. Chiu is closely involved with some specific application areas in which low overhead is critical. Since the range of applications is large, we target participants from various academic and industrial organizations. Workshop Format --------------- We are considering a 3-4 hour session consisting of about 6-8 invited presentations divided into two categories. Each category would be followed by a short panel discussion consisting of the presenters. Non-Exhaustive Topic List ------------------------- Any innovative and rigorous approaches, theoretical tools, engineering methods, practical implementation analysis and experimental reports related to the following topic list are of interest for this workshop. - XML parsing/validation - XML transformation, e.g., XSLT, XPath, and XQuery - Binary message representations - Web services engines performance, e.g., message deserialization - Security overhead, e.g. WS-Security and federation - Enterprise service bus, mediation, brokering - Grid computing performance, e.g., OGSI, WSRF - Industrial experiences in Web services applications - H/W acceleration - Prediction, benchmarking tools and techniques Possible Presenters ------------------- Possible presenters include members of the Community Grids Lab (Indiana University) headed by Geoffrey Fox, members of the Extreme Computing Lab (Indiana University) directed by Dennis Gannon, Robert van Engelen (Florida State University), Madhusudhan Govindaraju (SUNY-Binghamton), Michael Lewis (SUNY-Binghamton), Kevin J. Ma (CISCO), Radim Bartos (University of New Hampshire), Alex Ng (Macquarie University), Paul Greenfield (CSIRO ICT Centre), Shiping Chen (CSIRO ICT Centre), Bill Allcock (ANL). These presenters have not been contacted, but are active in the area, and have either previously given presentations or published papers in the area. Organizers ---------- Kenneth Chiu, State University of New York (SUNY) Binghamton, NY, USA. Kenneth Chiu is an assistant professor of Computer Science at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. His research interests are in distributed systems, with a focus on web services and Grid computing. He is currently a co-PI on three NSF-funded projects to develop service-oriented systems for scientific instruments and sensor networks. The first of these is part of the NSF Middleware Initiative, and the second of these is the first award of the NSF National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) project. The third project is the CrystalGrid project which seeks to integrate data management and instrumentation for X-ray crystallography. He received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University. Yuichi Nakamura, IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory, Japan. Yuichi Nakamura is a manager of the Software Lifecycle team at IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory. His team is running Model-Driven Development, program analysis and end-user programming projects. His research interests are Web services technologies. Some projects he is conducting are found in http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/wssecurity/index_e.htm. One of his key accomplishments is the development of a Web Services Security (WSS) component for the IBM WebSphere Application Server product, as a technical lead. Currently, he is working on Web services performance issues, and usability of WSS tooling. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Osaka University in 1990. tech_requirements: prereq_participants: advertise_suggestion: Various Apache, Globus, and Oasis mailing lists. Specifics will be provided if this proposal is accepted. From pawel.plaszczak at gridwisetech.com Sat Aug 20 04:25:53 2005 From: pawel.plaszczak at gridwisetech.com (pawel.plaszczak at gridwisetech.com) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 04:25:53 -0500 Subject: [communities] GGF Proposal Submission Message-ID: <200508200925.j7K9Pr028952@delta.mcs.anl.gov> proposers_name: Pawel Plaszczak, Olaf Bujak, Jakub Dziwisz affiliation: GridwiseTech email: pawel.plaszczak at gridwisetech.com proposed_title: Grid Primer for Managers session_type: tutorial/workshop tba proposed_duration: 1/2 day target_audience: Managers, decision makers num_attendees: 15-100, strongly depends on marketing abstract: We propose to augment the GGF meetings with a Grid Primer workshop similar to the one we have delivered at the GGF14. This will be a management-level Grid technology tutorial, primarily focused at the newcomers to the field. It will answer the questions: - What is Grid computing? Why and how is it useful in business? - What is Grid technology? Is it usable? What is the state of the market? - What does a ?Grid architecture? and ?Grid application? mean? - Why and how should I migrate to a Grid architecture? - Why should I grid-enable my software product, and how do I go about it? synopsis: The tutorial will follow the ?learn by example? principle. We will demonstrate several software layers typically seen in Grid architectures. There will be a chance for participatns to interact with Grid in real time through a simplified portal-based demo user interface and experience the benefits the technology can bring. At the tutorial we will also review the solutions existing on the market and discuss examples of institutions who successfully deployed grids. The discussion on managerial issues, such as ROI and TCO calculations, team management and project planning, can appear as an interweaving thread. However, we suggest not to make this the main subject of the class. Although the class is directed mainly to decision makers, we feel that our primary mission would be to help people understand the concepts and opportunities. We think that showing a coherent message of Grid technology, backed by examples and demos, is the most promising way to go. Our experience from past tutorials ------------------------------------ The tutorial will be based on the material from the pilot Grid Primer tutorial that we have delivered at the GGF14 in Chicago. Generally, the tutorial went as planned. It took 4 hours, with a 10 minute break. The first part was a technology overview, the second part was a business side overview. Participants were definitely more interested in the first part. There were also three demonstrations, one of them during the first part of the tutorial and the other two after the second one. We made the tutorial interactive and we managed to engage participants into several discussions, also among themselves. People were very keen on learning each other?s perspective, which was valuable beause of their differing background and because many of them weren?t quite the beginners. However, this wasn?t always easy because the group was fairly diverse, sometimes with differing expectations. We also encouraged participants to interrupt with their questions or comments. This happened several times and we were able to make short ?side trips? towards two or three niche subjects that the audience was interested in. We had some chocolates, souvenirs and off-topic ?wake up? slides for those who could not stand 4 hours of teaching. After the class it could be seen that people were tired, but the anonymous feedback forms were very positive. People filled in an online questionnaire before registration, and the paper feedback form after the class was done. For extra feedback, we have also later talked in person to several attendees later during the conference. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Within 6 people who filled in the anonymous feedback form, five were positive or extremely positive. We are especially proud of these statements: - ?Especially capable presenters? - ?Excellent course? - ?Worth the time and helped clear relations between technologies? - ?Well thought of & comprehensive? Only one form was predominantly critical. Most critics we received was constructive. The predominant thought is that people would be eager to skip some theoretical material in favor of learning by example. We are working on improving our material in this direction. Our expertise -------------- GridwiseTech is an independent consultant in Grid computing, offering training, management consulting and assistance with the development and integration of Grid systems. Gridwise was founded in 2003 by former developers of the Globus Project. Pawel Plaszczak is the President of the company. Apart from leading GridwiseTech, he has spent the greater part of the past year working on the book ?Grid Computing: Savvy Manager?s Guide?, which will be published by Morgan Kauffman/Elsevier in September 2005. During this time Pawel has conducted numerous interviews and consultations with vendors, early adopters and technology experts. Since the intended audience of this work is identical with that of the proposed workshop, GridwiseTech well suited to plan and prepare the content of such an event. During the past two years Pawel and GridwiseTech have conducted a number of Grid-related workshops and tutorials, lasting from 2 hours to 3 days. They have usually received extremely positive feedback for our expertise, enthusiastic approach and flexibility with the audience?s needs. GridwiseTech unique in the field of Grid computing for being vendor-independent. Their mission is to provide unbiased expertise on the subject which is necessary in a workshop like this. tech_requirements: Demonstrations need reliable network connection allowing us to log in to remote sites using SSH and Web browser. Demonstrations are not extremely bandwidth intensive, at most we should assume all participants trying to download 200 KB image from the Web in the same time. We need reliable wireless, a projector, and a KVM switch between two laptops of two presenters. prereq_participants: None, apart from generic knowledge about computer science/information technologies. Tutorial is useful for managers/decision makers, less useful for students/developers. advertise_suggestion: At the GGF14, we were grateful for Steve?s emails and Mark?s keynote remark. We also think better planning and earlier scheduling of the marketing action could attract more new people to the Grid Primer, and eventually attract more people to the GGF. We also suggest cross linking between ours and GGF?s Grid Primer web pages. Our page had more information and also allows people to become comfortable with presenters? Cvs, company profile, and online material (will publish soon). Such information makes people more comfortable with the class and potentially more willing to sign it. Synchronization and cooperation with the GridWorld marketing actions can be very useful, as the audience is similar to that of GridPrimer.