[Pgi-wg] PGI TelCon 2009-03-13 Meeting Minutes available for Comments

[Oxana Smirnova]

And one more coment here:

> 
> Implementations of these 'academic' versions of BES & JSDL are being
> used in commercial production grids. Don't ask me which - I want to
> avoid quality time with lawyers.

I'm hearing of not-to-be-named elusive commercial grids quite often, and I'd love to learn from their experience. If they are happy with the existing standards - good for them. Being so much shrouded in secrecy, they obviously have no need to interoperate.

In our case, the key motivation has been clear: interoperability between 3 specific non-secret production grids; this group spawned from GIN and thus it is not surprising indeed that it has problems often opposite to those of secret grids.

> Yes, CREAM, ARC & UNICORE have interface that are different to BES &
> JSDL. Yes they have throughput requirements that were not necessarily
> considered when BES & JSDL were assembled.

Can't tell for BES, but for JSDL all our requirements were quickly and famously deemed to be out of scope. You JSDL guys even took pride in it and printed a T-shirt ;-)

Seriously, one key fragment in this picture is GLUE2, which was developed mostly by gLite, ARC and Unicore people, and the very origin of PGI lies in integrating these 3 standards. Obviously, those who do not need GLUE2 may have a different opinion, but PGI started as a BES/JSDL/GLUE2 integration effort, and its motto used to be "Stay focused".

> 
> But for deployment certification we REQUIRE performance and
> capability - not a specific function call. There are many ways this
> can be delivered AND be interoperable.

In infrastructures driven by user needs requirements can be quite specific, and definitions of performance may vary. For example, WLCG has even a special SRM 2.2 MoU, describing such extremely specific details, it makes people crying. This is of course an extreme example, but I will be surprised if there is any EGEE user who is concerned about standard interfaces. They are however interested to see (a) their jobs running the way they like it and (b) their jobs running everywhere. There's also very important (c): since public money are involved, politicians want to see it blinking and beeping, this is why Laurence added latitude and longitude to the mandatory Glue attributes ;-)

I have a nagging feeling that GLUE2, being the raison d'etre for this group, is falling between the cracks. 

I hope these historical background notes of mine help to clear up misunderstandings.

Cheers,
Oxana