[SAGA-RG] OGF 18 - SAGA Minutes

Tue Sep 19 08:34:10 CDT 2006

Hello all,

Here are the minutes of the two sessions held at OGF in Washington DC.

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Session: SAGA I
Time: Tuesday 12 September 2006, 10:00-11:30 AM
Place: Washington Convention Center - Room 155
Attendees: ~15
Steering: Shantenu Jha
Notes: Pascal Kleijer
Phone: Andre Merzky

Administration:
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IPR
SAGA Status and history for newbie.
State of the RG and the WG, API v1.0 submission after GGF 18.

SAGA Look & Feel:
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Andre: Simple and quick overview of the Look and Feel (L&F) aspects of the specification. What is in and what not.

Ron: Does Java implementation interacts with GT4? 
Andre: CoG might be interacting but GT4 is not indented.
Shantenu: Might be in the future by some group in the UK.

Andre: Brief explanation of the slides. A more detailed explanation of the Interface & Class hierarchy. Discussion first focuses on the L&F, and then the functional API.

Q: Where is the document in Grid forge? 
A: The SAGA-Core-WG documents section should contain it; it is found in the SAGA-RG documents section.
TODO: Synchronize both projects in Grid forge to cross point the relevant documents.

Q: What happens if a method in the specification doesn't have an underlying implementation?
A: Then the implementation is not compliant with the spec.
Q: What then?
A: We can throw an exception. This is in the spec document, the General Discussion section.

Q: Discussion of the BES state model and SAGA is there compatibility? A: yes, there are some additional states.

Discussion of COMPLIANT but INCOMPLETE, NOT COMPLIANT. Can be found in the document.

Q: L&F is not an appropriate name; something better (bit mis-leading)?
R: "Foundation" or "Principle" might be a better? Needs to think about it! One proposal is to replace it with 'Principles of Foundations'
TODO: Fire this issue on the ML for future discussion.

Q: Can we break down into namespace or blocks to support sub-sets to be implemented? This could allow partial implementation.
R: Yes this is already possible even if there is no clear namespace definition.

TODO: Andrew Grimshaw pointed: SAGA should send experiences to OGF SC about compliance. 

TODO: FIXME must be removed before the document is sent to the OGF SC.

Q: Is this document supposed to help the developer or make then have head aches?
R: No we try to help them as much as we can. 

TODO: Get feedback is important to improve it, seek feedback as much as possible.

Q: What middleware is supposed to be supported?
R: C++ version should support GT4 in the future. 
e.g., OMII implementation supports their stack, though that might not be so in the future.
Remark: Vendors support needed to develop bindings to their platform. 
Andrew Grimshaw: Go to customers, all vendors were involved.

This is a problem that OGF in general has to help tackle. It is not only a SAGA task. OGF SC needs to get involved as well.

Why not use the MPI model? Take the vendors together, it that feasible right now? 

Customer: Stable API is a must, possibility to switch between implementations.

SAS representative: Will be useful if it provides all functionality
(i.e., don't want to have to depend on different APIs). Equally don't want statically linked libraries!

Go directly to the customers (e.g., Banks, Boeing, TeraGrid...), not just vendor, to ask them if they need it and how they need it. Use the customers to push ISV to support SAGA. 

TODO: Shantenu Jha needs to take contact with several people for future discussions. Business card taken: SAS, Intel, Qualcomm & GSI

Chris: better framework to help quick implementation for sub-sets of the API. Platform could focus on the just Job Mgmt

Adoption:
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Steven: SAGA should be pushed in the OGF technical strategy committee (document in the pipeline). See the TSC. 
- SAGA finds important mention in the OGFs Tech Strategy committe

Q: SAGA in GIN?
A: Steven Newhouse mentions that there is considerable debate ongoing

Marketing material to promote SAGA is a necessity to make it pushed forward. It should not be an API technical document for developers but a manager type document.

Q: Who should SAGA approach first: Vendor, Customer or ISV? 

EGEE Earth science at the Frauenhofer Institute (SCAI) is interested in testing SAGA. 

TODO: Seek contact with them to see what can be done.

Andre: GT4, EGEE (gLight), NAREGI, etc. (big projects) should provide a binding to help push the project.

Steven: SAGA is client side stuff thus we should promote that in the marketing.

(SAS) provide a new use case about their needs. Grid Monitoring is important to them.

TODO: Send use case canvas to them (Shantenu Jha)

Next session expectations:
* Streaming
* Messaging
* Next step
* Marketing material

There were offline discussions with SAS representative and with RAL representative about information services.

Session closed at 11h30.

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Session: SAGA II
Time: Tuesday 12 September 2006, 13:30-15:00 PM
Place: Washington Convention Center - Room 155
Attendees: ~12
Steering: Shantenu Jha
Notes: Pascal Kleijer
Phone: Andre Merzky

Administration:
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Agenda Bashing
IPR
Session rescheduling

Streaming:
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Remark: Typo in section 3.12 GWD-R.72: "627" at the intro of the paragraph.

Q: Juelich VISIT group, in their implementation wants to explore extensions in the stream API. 
R: Some can be covered in the messaging API.

Q: Is their any group using the API?
R: Yes at LSU is working on visualization apps using the streams.

Their use case did not cover their new needs. SSH tunneling might be necessary inn the future.

TODO: Juelich can be put in contact directly with John Shalf for more details and getting things moving on.
Update: Done (Shantenu Jha)

Messaging:
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Intro from Andre about this API.

Q: Did the API solve the visualization uses cases?
R: Yes it did. Large messages support causes some problems at the implementation level but manageable.

Q: How can we do bi-directional streaming through one tunnel?
R: This is an implementation issue. The API doesn't care.

Q: Any thoughts on this?
TODO: Put things on the ML for more detailed feedback. Clean up stuff then post.

Next Step:
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Platform: Symphony presentation at GGF 17. Platform is looking for an API for their product (Symphony).

Q: Is any other person interesting in this extension? Possible solution is working on the SAGA L&F from Platform side.

Q: Performance important?
R: Important to critical.
TODO: Remind Chris to post his proposal on the ML before the next call.

Marketing:
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TODO: get contact with Steven Newhouse and Andrew Grimshaw about what to put in the next marketing material flier. Pascal takes the job.

CPR:
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Quick overview of what it is! 
TODO: Send CPR document to the SAGA ML (Derek's job).
Update: Done 
Closing Remarks: Any contribution for getting the SAGA out to the outside is welcome.

Session close at 14:30.

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k-pasukaru at ap.jp.nec.com