[dmis-bof] Updated Charter

Arie Shoshani shoshani at lbl.gov
Fri Mar 17 18:52:37 CST 2006


Bill, et al,

Sorry, I was swamped, and only I had a chance to go over the charter in 
detail yesterday.  I saw a couple of items that I'd like to comment on.

1) Regarding the sentence:
"Setting up a data movement includes the selection of a transport 
protocol, for example GridFTP, and parameters for reliability, timing, 
scheduling, resource usage, accounting, billing, etc. The Working Group 
will explore existing mechanisms to reach such agreement, e.g. 
WS-Agreement and use them where appropriate."

Thus, in the setup phase, all kinds of services will have to be 
contacted, such as components that manage resources, components that 
perform scheduling, keep track of accounting, etc.  For example, to 
reserve storage space, the data movement service may want to interact 
with SRMs.  I think this is a huge undertaking, and too large of a 
scope.  Even if you go through WS-agreement, it will have to interact 
with various resource managers, accounting, billing, etc.  You may want 
to leave all the setup to a separate component, like WS-agreement, and 
then focus on the data movement part.

2) A related point, in the "Seven questions: Evaluation Criteria (from 
GFD.3)" document it says:
"The most direct overlap would be with the gsm-wg, but they are 
participating in this group and will, presumably, use what is developed 
here for the transport portion of their interface."

Yes, it makes sense for SRMs to make use of powerful transport services, 
since SRMs rely on transport services.  But, when a request is made to 
an SRM, they take care of managing storage space, keeping track of usage 
and accounting, as well as perform scheduling, so it does not make sense 
for the transport services to negotiate storage allocations (including 
lifetime), scheduling, etc, again, as is suggested in the "setup phase" 
above.

3) In the charter document, it says:
"To accomplish 3^rd party data transfer, a uniform, yet abstract naming 
scheme for resources (data in general, files in particular) is required. 
This working group will provide such abstract uniform naming scheme."

I think this was the goal of the GFS-WG group, to the extent that I 
understand what they doing.  It might be good to coordinate with them.  
Also, isn't the issue if a uniform name space (also referred to as 
logical namespace) and its mapping into physical names fall into the RLS 
domain (and future related activities).  Do you really want to keep 
track of this mapping as part of the data movement service?  Perhaps I 
don't understand the concept.  Please clarify.

Thanks, Arie





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