[ogsa-wg] Paper proposing "evolutionary vertical design efforts"

[Marvin Theimer]

Enclosed is a paper that advocates an additional set of activities that
the authors believe that the OGSA working groups should engage in.

 

Broadly speaking, the OGSA and related working groups are already doing
a bunch of important things:

*         There is broad exploration of the big picture, including
enumeration of use cases, taxonomy of areas, identification of research
issues, etc.

*         There is work going on in each of the horizontal areas that
have been identified, such as EMS, data services, etc.

*         There is working going around individual specifications, such
as BES, JSDL, etc.

 

Given that individual specifications are beginning to come to fruition,
the authors believe it is time to also start defining "vertical
profiles" that precisely describe how groups of individual
specifications should be employed to implement specific use cases in an
interoperable manner.  The authors also believe that the process of
defining these profiles offers an opportunity to "close the design loop"
by relating the various on-going protocol and standards efforts back to
the use cases in a very concrete manner.  This provides an end-to-end
setting in which to identify holes and issues that might require
additional protocols and/or (incremental) changes to existing protocols.
The paper introduces both the general notion of doing focused vertical
"design efforts" and then focuses on a specific vertical design effort,
namely a minimal HPC design.  

 

The paper derives a specific HPC design in a "first principles" manner
since the authors believe that this increases the chances of identifying
issues.  As a consequence, existing specifications and the activities of
existing working groups are not mentioned and this paper is not an
attempt to actually define a specifications profile.  Also, the absence
of references to existing work is not meant to imply that such work is
in any way irrelevant or inappropriate.  The paper should be viewed as a
first abstract attempt to propose a new kind of activity within OGSA.
The expectation is that future open discussions and publications will
explore the concrete details of such a proposal.

 

This paper was recently sent to a few key individuals in order to get
feedback from them before submitting it to the wider GGF community.
Unfortunately that process took longer than intended and some members of
the community may have already seen a copy of the paper without knowing
the context within it was written.  This email should hopefully dispel
any misconceptions that may have occurred.

 

For those people who will be around on for the F2F meetings on Friday,
Marvin Theimer will be giving a talk on the contents of this paper at a
time and place to be announced.

 

Marvin Theimer, Savas Parastatidis, Tony Hey, Marty Humphrey, Geoffrey
Fox

 

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