Current and Future Perspectives of Grid Technology Panel Advanced Research Workshop on High Performance Computing Cetraro June 1 2004 Geoffrey Fox Community Grids Lab Indiana University gcf@indiana.edu

Questions I Is it wise or risky to start a new Grid? There are no significant dangers if one adopts a conservative technology strategy Use the basic service architecture; including applications Use simple Web Services starting with those in WS-I Others will be added and can be classified in terms of risk of adoption and probability of change Use proven capabilities such as Condor, Globus 2, GridFTP, GridRPC; RGMA, SRB, OGSA-DAI, UNICORE good but less clear; risk depends on project of course Use workflow model and expect BPEL to win but be incomplete Use portlet architecture for user interfaces Build services as small as possible and match choice of services and interfaces to others (OGSA?) Use messaging where possible; avoid frameworks Performance will improve; SOAP can use fastest transport

Status of WS-Standards In order of increasing risk, we start with WS-Interoperability Profile 1.0a (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI). WS-Security being added gradually WS-Reliability and WS-ReliableMessaging are generally believed to be technically close, and sound. The risk of adopting one of them is therefore relatively low. BPEL is an important, emerging, widely-supported workflow specification though it is not yet a standard. There are then some standards were Microsoft and IBM agree but others (Sun, Oracle often) do not WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-MetadataExchange, WS-Federation, WS-Coordination, WS-Atomic Transactions, WS-BusinessActivity. Implementations of these are available from both IBM and Microsoft,

Questions II What are Pacing Items: Problems with existing Middleware: Several efforts are focusing on building robust middleware – VDT, Globus, NSF NMI, UK OMII, EU EGEE, WS-? From industry Just be patient and don’t “jump the gun” – not necessary Standards will take a while as not enough experience Initial Grids can use current “initial software” Scarcity of people: Doubtful in USA: we need jobs!! Security Concerns Security consensus and technology most serious problem for Grids. Other problems have clearer engineering solutions Policy for sharing resources There are security issues and some fields are not familiar with sharing observational data but it hasn’t bothered my projects

Questions III How long will it take for Grids to be prevalent Grids, P2P, Enterprise systems, Utility computing. Web services will intermingle and merge. If we call the amalgam a Grid it will become prevalent in 3-5 years in “pretty big” Science; longer in a broader environment Good software for “many” of important services should be available in 2 years What is your one wish That collaborative/community Grids become sufficiently good that one doesn’t need to travel as much Last mile networking is critical!