[Pgi-wg] Definition of a Production Grid : Multi-institutional Infrastructure for e-Science

Tue Mar 17 11:26:33 CDT 2009

Laurence and all,

Concerning the definition of a Production Grid :

Lot of thanks to Laurence for proposing the first definition, and for 
proposing 'Multi-institutional International Infrastructures for e-Science'.

Following David WALLOM, I think that 'International' is too restrictive. 
  The key point is that a Production Grid spans institutional 
boundaries, which presents a whole load of policy and legal issues.

So I propose 'Multi-institutional Infrastructure for e-Science'.

Today, there can be Production Grids which do NOT use IGTF as trust anchor.
But for interoperability, they will have to migrate and use IGTF as 
trust anchor.

Inside the EDGeS project, we think that 'Production Grids' encompass 
both 'Service Grids' and 'Desktop Grids'.

Shortly :

-  A Service Grid (SG) is a managed grid of managed computing clusters, 
offering a guaranteed QoS (Quality of Service).  Typically, institutions 
with their managed clusters can join to SGs if they sign a certain SLA 
(Service Level Agreement) with the leadership of the SG.  Since 
participants to a SG are most often institutions, an SG is often called 
an 'Institutional Computing Grid'.
    Examples of such service grid infrastructures are EGEE, NorduGrid, 
OSG, DEISA, TeraGrid.

-  A Desktop Grid (DG) is a loose opportunistic grid using idle 
resources.  Inside desktop grids, computing and storage resources are 
typically owned by individual volunteer owners and not by institutes 
(therefore it is often called volunteer computing).
    Even if each single desktop computer provides a very low QoS, a 
desktop grid of reasonable size can, as a whole, provide a defined QoS 
and sign a SLA.
    Examples of such desktop grid systems are BOINC, XtremWeb, OurGrid, 
Xgrid.

You can find a full description with drawings in chapter 5 
'Technological context of the EDGeS project' of EDGeS deliverable DNA3.1 
at 
http://www.edges-grid.eu:8080/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=11065&folderId=27671&name=DLFE-1042.pdf

If you can NOT access this document, please let me now, I would then 
upload it to Gridforge.

Best regards.

----------------------------------
Etienne URBAH          IN2P3 - LAL
Bat 200     91898 ORSAY     France
Tel: +33 1 64 46 84 87
Mob: +33 6 22 30 53 27
Skype: etienne.urbah
mailto:urbah at lal.in2p3.fr
----------------------------------

On Tue, 17 Mar 2009, Laurence Field wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> Agreed, we should stop using the word production.
> 
> I think that the key point associated with large is that it spans 
> international boundaries which presents a whole load of policy and legal 
> issues. The IGTF is the body which helps to facility international trust 
> relationships and each country has its own CA. Maybe it should be 
> "Multi-institutional International Infrastructures for e-Science". 
> 
> Laurence
> 
> David Wallom wrote:
>> I have to firmly disagree. Production should refer to the quality and number
>> of services that are available rather than its specific size. The scaling of
>> an infrastructure has nothing at the moment to do with whether its resources
>> are interoperable. Your separation of large is a completely arbitrary one. A
>> production grid should be able to display policies and procedures for the
>> management services and SLDs for the services that it provides users.
>>
>> Are you suggesting for example that a single national grid is not a
>> production service? I can assure you for example that GLOW and other
>> components of OSG as well as the UK NGS etc get an awful lot of work done
>> with many many publications in high value refereed journals etc. as a direct
>> result. Maybe we could use publication impact of the work done as a measure
>> instead, it would be as arbitrary as 'real work'?
>>
>> David
>>
>> On 17/03/2009 14:50, "Moreno Marzolla" <moreno.marzolla at pd.infn.it> wrote:
>>
>>   
>>> David Wallom wrote:
>>>     
>>>> Hi Lawrence,
>>>>       
>>> [...]
>>>     
>>>> 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.
>>>>       
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I think that this definition is a bit generic, in the sense that it
>>> surely defines a "Grid", but I don't see how it addresses the term
>>> "Production" (which I agree is a term a bit elusive to quantify/qualify
>>> appropriately).
>>> In my mind I always associated "production" grids to those large-scale
>>> infrastructures (how much large?) that are used to get "real job" done
>>> (what does "real job" mean?). This is what I thought was the line
>>> dividing "production" grids from "non-production" ones.
>>>
>>> Moreno.
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