[Pgi-wg] Definition of a Production Grid

[David Wallom]

Hi Lawrence,

I would be very uncomfortable with your definitions, this describes the
status quo and possibly not something that could be existing in 18 months
time. 

For example An internal Campus Grid running production systems, management,
accounting, security etc. will require interoperability between
institutions, not necessarily through national grids.

Shibboleth is rapidly gaining ground for authentication and authorization
and will be used for example by the UK NGI quite soon.

And all of the others I am uncomfortable with, as far as I can see I think
your criteria would for example not include DEISA?

Can I suggest that we just set performance, policy and procedure targets and
go from there. I.e. You grid will have legally compliant accounting for
utilisation by a number of users that are identified using a strong
authentication and authorisation mechanism, across a set of physically
separate resources that may or may not be legally owned by more than one
legal entity. The services that these offer can be many and varied but all
should operate to a defined quality of service definition.

That would be easier for everyone to sign up to.

David

PS The University of Oxford campus grid would though satisfy all of your
criteria except we have ~100 users across 38 different independent legal
entities within the university.

PPS For those that wonder what real production is I would suggest looking at
CycleComputing.com there they provide grid services to a significant number
of commercial organisations, with legal guarantees on data separations and
legal consequences if things go wrong. I doubt that there would be real
legal ramifications if EGEE/ARC/DEISA didn't fulfill their SLDs

On 17/03/2009 13:58, "Laurence Field" <Laurence.Field at cern.ch> wrote:

> Dear All,
> 
> The word Grid means different things to different people and this quite
> frequently leads to misunderstandings and conflict. This is especially
> true within OGF where people from many different domains and backgrounds
> discuss "Grids".  While each and every definition themselves are as
> valid as each other, trying to discuss a concept from two possibly
> unrelated perspectives is quite difficult.
> 
> Before we move forward in the PGI activity we therefore need understand
> what we mean by "Grid" and hence the problem we are trying to solve.  It
> seems that in some recent threads the word "production" has cause some
> disagreements as this word is more commonly used to reflect quality
> rather than concepts.
> 
>  From my perspective I can try to define the core properties that I see
> are key when describing the EGEE infrastructure. I would hope that
> similar infrastructures with whom EGEE would like to interoperate would
> have a similar description.
> 
> I would like to introduce the term "Muti-institutional infrastructures
> for e-Science" which can be used to describe something with the
> following properties.
> 
> 1) Multi-institutional.
> The EGEE infrastructure is composed by linking resources that reside at
> autonomous academic institutes. The key concept here is the
> administrative domain which maps to a real institute and that there is
> more than one institute in the infrastructure.
> 
> 2) The Virtual Organization
> The main aspects that links these institutes is the drive to collaborate
> in order to do science. The collaborations are defined by Virtual
> Organizations.
> 
> 3) x509 Certificates and Proxies
> Users are identified by x509 certificates which are provided by CAs
> accredited by the IGTF. Proxies are typically used to interact with
> services.
> 
> 4) VOMS
> To identify which VO a user is belong to is by contacting VOMS. VOMS
> also supports Roles an Groups within the VO which is implemented by
> adding attributes to the proxy.
> 
> 5) Multiple Services
> The are many different types of services each of which can define their
> own interfaces which may or many not be a Web Service.
> 
> 6) Parrallel Information System
> The information about services is found by querying an information
> system which is not necessarily related to the service interface.
> 
> 6) Scale
> 100s of administrative domains, thousands of users, thousands of
> services, millions of computing actives and petabytes of data.
>  
> This may be a can of worms but if we can agree on a set of properties
> for what we mean by "Production Grid" it might help in the discussions.
> I don't mean that anything that has different properties is not a
> production grid, I just want to clarify what this group mean when it
> talks about a Grid infrastructures.
> 
> Laurence
> 
> 
> Laurence
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 
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