[Pgi-wg] Definition of a Production Grid

Tue Mar 17 10:35:55 CDT 2009

Hi David,

What I would be interested to find out is what are the similarities and 
differences between an infrastructures like EGEE and a Campus Grid? I 
tried to give a definition of what I saw as the key properties of the 
EGEE infrastructure, what would you say are the key properties of a 
Campus Grid? This is important as we might be talking about different 
entities which address subtly different problems and hence difficult to 
discuss in the same context.  I have a poster on my wall from Oracle 
which says "The Oracle Grid Just Keeps Running". I am sure it is 
production quality and could be classed as an infrastructure but it is 
not what I have in mind what I used the word "Grid", from my perspective 
it describes a clustered solution.

I am not an oracle (sorry for the pun) and if I could predict the future 
accurately  would be richer or less poorer :) than I am now. The current 
situation is that all the current users of EGEE and similar 
infrastructures have X509 proxies from CAs accredited by the IGTF and 
belong to VOs. I would be very surprised if this situation was different 
in 18 months. Migrating OSG, EGEE and ARC to a different paradigm is not 
something that can be done overnight and until an alternative solution 
is presented and accepted, the time scale for doing such a migration can 
not be even guessed.

The goal is not necessarily to define a list of properties to include 
everything. We might end up with a different set of properties for 
"multi-institutional infrastructures for e-Science" and "Campus Grids". 
I would see this as being an advantage because we could then focus on 
what was common rather getting confused by what was different. 

Unfortunately I don't have answers just questions.

Laurence

David Wallom wrote:
> 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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>>     
>
>   