[communities] GGF Proposal Submission

[kchiu at cs.binghamton.edu]

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.