[tsc] A little help needed

[David Snelling]

[Bicycle crash boiler plate: I will include this boiler plate in my  
mails for a few weeks to apologize for terseness in the rest of the  
mail.  I have a broken finger from the crash on Oct 4th, and typing  
is hard and possible only in short spurts. Sorry, Dave.]

Folks on the TSC,

Mark needs a little help, and on a short fuse.

I have tried to outline some simple ideas to these questions, but I  
think David B. needs more detail than I can provide at present.

On 21 Nov 2006, at 18:38, Linesch, Mark wrote:

> David, Joel,
>
> Need a little help from the Standards/Technical team here…
> In the process of writing the Grid and Distributed Computing  
> Landscape document, David Birnbaum has come up with a series of  
> questions that need to be answered for the reader. Can you look  
> these over and do the following: (a) Answer these questions from  
> your perspective; (b) identify an OGF expert who might be able to  
> answer one or more of these questions and send them the question  
> and solicit them to provide a response. The responses can be in the  
> form of a short paragraph per question but try to be as specific  
> and factual as possible in your answer. David will utilize your  
> responses and others as in-depth source material as he continues to  
> write the document.
>
> QUESTIONS:
> 1. What are the issues or limitations of a virtualized server  
> infrastructure that can be addressed by grid capabilities?
Virtualizing a server infrastructure only addresses one layer in the  
system. The Grid provides, using many of the same concepts as SOA,  
virtualization of higher layers of the stack, e.g. application etc.
> 2. What are the issues or limitations that might be encountered  
> during either a pilot or production implementation of SOA that can  
> be addressed by grid capabilities?
The key issues here are scale and dynamics. Most SOA deployments are  
relative small scale of highly specialized. Adding Grid to SOA  
provides a more dynamic platform, allowing new service to come and go  
continuously.
> 3. Applications
> a. Which non-compute intensive applications are well suited to  
> running on a grid?
This one is out of my scope.
> b. What modifications are needed to run an application on a grid?  
> Does the application have to support parallel processing?
If the aim of using Grid is to exploit many servers on a single task,  
then yes parallelism is necessary. This does not necessarily mean the  
application needs adaptation. Many applications are already parallel  
in nature or the parallelism can be supported by parts of the Grid  
middle ware. For example, most transaction based applications  would  
not require changing, provided that the underlying database provided  
support for distributed transactions.
> c. Are I/O intensive applications not suitable for grid?
Provided that the infrastructure and application are designed for it,  
data intensive applications work very well on a Grid. care is needed  
in ensuring that data transfer bottle necks are managed and that the  
data itself is distributed across the Grid infrastructure. The  
applications should be configured to tolerate latency, e.g. using  
work queues.
> 4. For an enterprise IT architect, what grid standards, services  
> and technologies does OGF recommend that they have on their  
> planning horizon over the next three years?
The list in the Technical Strategy Document is a good start. I would  
add to that standards for data centre management, which may come from  
OGF or elsewhere.

> Please email your perspective/response to these questions directly  
> to David and copy me by EOD, Wed, November 29th. Your help is much  
> appreciated.
I know this is less text than you need, but at least it's on time. I  
hope the rest of the TSC can help.


-- 

Take care:

     Dr. David Snelling < David . Snelling . UK . Fujitsu . com >
     Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe
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