[Pgi-wg] Gridiron, or standardization gone backwards

[Oxana Smirnova]

Hi Morris, all,

I definitely don't give up - otherwise I wouldn't have been writing 
these mails ;-) I try to understand what made the initially rapid 
process stale. And I do believe that substantial differences between 
different technologies do create obstacles. If the technologies would 
have been sufficiently similar, like soccer played in Scotland and 
England, it would have been straightforward to create common standards.

Let's sit back and have a look at the crowd flocked to PGI, and ask 
ourselves, what exactly do we all want to achieve?

Morris, I know you like low-hanging fruits :-) Next time you're in Lund, 
I'll show you an odd pear tree in the neighborhood: it was not pruned 
for hundred years or so, and is as tall as a pine now. Imagine where are 
low-hanging pears ;-) PGI keeps growing, fruits are getting out of 
reach. A tall pear tree certainly will create a large impact when 
felled, but is pretty much useless fruit-wise.

It is easy to understand why so many technology providers are in PGI: 
the original PGI proclaimed that we'll create *the* reference standards, 
and everybody got worried that their favorite requirement won't be taken 
into account. No wonder we collected 237 or so *contradictory* requirements.

The high-level use case we tried to address 2 years ago was:

"A computing infrastructure is created using services provided by gLite, 
ARC and UNICORE"

Then, going into details of what is a "computing infrastructure", we 
came with requirements that:

1. job description must be common (common JSDL flavour)
2. resource discovery and monitoring must be common (common GLUE2 schema)
3. execution interfaces must be common (common BES)

Of course, authorisation and data management interfaces also must be 
common, but they were already largely unified thanks to GSI and SRM, so 
the task was easy and the goal was clearly in sight. Too bad it was 
never achieved - even though the impact wold have been limited, still 
quite many users would have benefited.


Now, what is the new PGI use case? "Create a worldwide computing 
infrastructure using all possible technologies"? I hope not. It will be 
a bit like creating a common NFL+FIFA championship ;-)


Cheers,
Oxana


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