Grids - the near future Mark Hayes NIEeS Summer School 2003
Web services A web service is a network-accessible application identified by a URI e.g. with an interface defined in terms of XML based messages these messages transported by internet protocols (usually HTTP) The application & its interface definition should be ‘discoverable’ by other applications independent of OS platform & programming language. W3C standards body:
Acronym soup XML - eXtensible Markup Language XSLT - eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol WSDL- Web Service Description Language UDDI - Universal Description, Discovery & Integration protocol BPEL - Business Process Execution Language WSIF - Web Services Invocation Framework …..
terraservice.net Web service interface to Example app: US Department of Agriculture have a database of soil properties, ‘federated’ with terraservice.net to provide geographical & topographic detail.
Grid services An extension of web services to provide for the dynamic creation (and destruction) of service instances. Why is this useful? Consider submitting a job… OGSA: Open Grid Services Architecture builds on... OGSI: Open Grid Services Infrastructure GGF standards body: OGSI specification now in GGF comments period. The community develops OGSA services.
Database Access & Integration OGSA services for federation of XML & relational databases.
Globus Toolkit v3 A re-implementation based on OGSI, though many services are wrappers around GT2 implementation. “Production” release just out: June 30th. Intended backwards compatibility with GT2.
The UK Grid in the next year GT2 based Grid will continue for at least the next year. In parallel, GT3 evaluation & experimental Grid On-going efforts to produce documentation, improve resource management & accounting, a user group…
UK eScience - future plans Digital curation centre - software development, best practices Open Middleware Institute - repository & software engineering of UK grown middleware More applications!