[communities] GGF Proposal Submission

[cdabrowski at nist.gov]

proposers_name: Christopher Dabrowski 
 
affiliation: National Institute of Standards and Technology 

email: cdabrowski at nist.gov 

proposed_title: Workshop on Reliability and Robustness in Grid Computing Systems 

session_type: Individual presentations 

proposed_duration: One-half day (afternoon, possibly extending to the evening) 

target_audience: Technical experts, users, managers 

num_attendees: 30-50 

abstract: Grid computing systems based on emerging Web Service and Grid standards will need to achieve levels of reliability and robustness necessary for enterprise applications in industry and science. This workshop will seek to bring together researchers and engineers whose organizations are actively addressing these concerns to share experiences and describe their research. Of particular interest will be methods and techniques that allow systems that use web-service and grid standards to detect and overcome failures in order to provide a level of reliability and robustness needed for industrial and scientific purposes. 

synopsis: If Web Service and Grid standards are to achieve widespread success in commercial and scientific sectors, systems based on these specifications will need to achieve levels of reliability and robustness necessary for enterprise applications in industry and science. 

The inherent complexity of grid computing systems poses formidable challenges to detecting and overcoming failures to achieve the required level of reliability. Three considerations are of special concern. First, the scale of grid computing systems is expected to grow dramatically as grid technology transitions to industrial use. Second, as operational grids scale, there is the possibility that unexpected interactions will occur among components that result in unpredicted emergent and possibly chaotic behaviors.   Finally, grids are likely to be subjected to volatile and uncertain conditions brought about by accidental outages and external attack. These three factors can potentially endanger or severely degrade the effectiveness of operational grids in everyday use.

Goal: The goal of the workshop will be bring together researchers and engineers from industry and academe whose organizations are actively addressing these concerns to share experiences and inform each other of their work in this area. Promoting information exchange can be generally expected to benefit ongoing grid reliability work as a whole. Moreover, despite the practical importance of this work, there are relatively few researchers working on grid reliability in comparison to other areas of grid work. They are quite possibly isolated and unaware of each other. The workshop will hopefully attract new experts to participate in the Research Group in Reliability and Robustness in Grid Computing Systems that is currently in the process of formation. Similarly, the workshop can serve to attract participation in other GGF Working Groups that are concerned with reliability issues. Workshop discussions also will serve as input to the program of work for the research group and ult!
imately to developing recommendations for how Web Services and Grid Standards can be progressed to ensure reliable grid applications. 

Content and Organization: The workshop should be an afternoon session beginning at 2:00 PM and running until the end of the day (or later, if there are a sufficient number of participants). The call statement (see http://xw2k.sdct.nist.gov/chrisd/ResearchGroup.htm) will request that interested parties provide informal presentations of up to 20 minutes on work being done within their organizations on grid reliability and related areas. The presentations will be informative and intended to allow meeting participants to learn of each other’s work. We will request that all presentations be in PowerPoint (or similar media) and that presenters agree that their presentations be posted on a GGF website.  The content of the workshop will be the presentations themselves. It would be appropriate to reserve time for short question and answer periods after each presentation and at the end of the session. Special topics of interest will be: 
•	Terminology of reliability, dependability, and robustness for grid
        systems.
•	Technologies supporting reliability, dependability, and robustness in
        grid systems. 
•	Strategies used by grid manufacturers (software vendors, service
        providers, etc.) and service consumers for improving reliability 
        (such as checkpointing, work-around techniques, and recovery methods). 
•	User experiences (in business and academic communities) with grid
        reliability.
•	Grid monitoring (of failure and system performance). 
•	Interactions between grid software and other network software during
        failure detection and recovery (multilayer recovery)

Additional topics may be suggested.  A program committee will be formed to review submissions, with notice of acceptance by January 20, 2006. The call statement specifies that presentations will be chosen on the basis of available time and the extent to which their content overlaps with the charter of the GGF Research Group on Reliability and Robustness (available at URL above). Prospective presenters will be requested to submit a one-page abstract describing the topic of their presentations (by January 10, 2006). Once submissions are received, it may be appropriate to subdivide the workshop topically and post an outline.

Marketing and Outreach: If approved, we would request that the workshop be advertised through channels available to GGF and, of course, be posted as part of the GGF16 schedule. The workshop will also be advertised through channels available to NIST. In addition, NIST is creating an unofficial website for the Research Group on Reliability and Robustness (pending its approval by GGF) that will post a notice of the workshop.

Preliminary Schedule: The deadline for submitting one-page abstracts will be January 10, 2006. Notice of acceptance will be provided by January 20. The workshop will be held February 13-17 at GGF16 in Athens.

Please note: I am sending the workshop call statment to you separately for reference purposes
 

tech_requirements: None. 

prereq_participants: None, GGF attendees. 

advertise_suggestion: See synopsis. I am sending the workshop call statment to you separately for reference purposes