© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd PRAGMA Update & some personal observations James Sankar Network Engineer - Middleware

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 2 Background Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly Founded in March 2002 as –A NSF funded organization for Pacific Rim institutions –to promote collaboration to develop grid-enabled applications deploy the needed infrastructure throughout the Pacific Region to allow data, computing, and other resource sharing. To enhance collaborations by promoting visiting scholars' and engineers' programs, building new collaborations, formalizing resource-sharing agreements, and continuing trans-Pacific network deployment. –to provide an opportunity for member institutions to work together to address applications and infrastructure research of common interest.

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 3 PRAGMA Today

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 4 Current Parallel GRID activities 1. GLOBUS: Global GRID apps & standards based toolkit Designed to help the scientific community to –Focus on developing computational GRID applications –Harness superior distributed processing power and storage resources to process and analyze data to solve specific problems. Globus Toolkit 4 release includes –security –data services, data access, data replication services –an open service oriented web based architecture that *should* be able to integrate with campus single sign on deployments via a PKI Some view Globus negatively as "flaky“ and hard to deploy and maintain, Some view Globus positively for –separating the AAI from applications and supporting –Support for multiple authentication methods, –Support for global scalability through federation policies and X509 based access controls.

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 5 Globus Toolkit 4 Source:

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 6 2. Less formal local / regionalized developments Clustering of computing resources has emerged as a cost effective high performance alternative to supercomputers. These communities tend to be small, informal, open and willing to share information and data, especially so with increases in international network bandwidth across national research and education networks. The current model is to manually set up experiments via known contacts, without a unified middleware / AAI in place. Unlike Globus there is no stringent middleware regime. Current Parallel GRID activities

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 7 Emerging trends – A personal view! General –From apps demonstrators to production ones (for real use) –From proprietary to open standards and code reuse –Towards a separate AAI layer –Towards a portal based application developments –Towards web portal based interfaces for application development (to create workflows to run experiments). For more permanent VO communities the trend seems to be –Moving away from separate networks accessing shared resources to campus network integration (when e2e bandwidth/QoS expectations met) –heading towards web services open architecture model –keen to use a stronger forms of AAI (e.g. PKI) –looking to gain leverage from existing campuses IAM infrastructures as the community grows

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 8 VO Application example - Wildfire Execution Condor GRID GEL data User uses Wildfire to create workflow as GEL script Execution on 1.Grid 2.Cluster, or 3.Local LSF Cluster fork Laptop Source: Francis Tang, Bioinformatics Institute, A-STAR, Singapore

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 9 Why should I care? Virtual Organisations may want – to use toolkits or – work informally with other groups What are the issues here? –What are the middleware/federation implications of e- science/campus network integration? –What admin/user training is required to set up specific VO requiremnets? –How do you accommodate specific VO apps requirements, especially the dynamic VOs reacting to a specific need?

© Copyright AARNet Pty Ltd 10 Future scenario – Personal view A common set of software components that can be shared across all applications to support Virtual Organisation environments where there are a –Set of standard collaborative tools –Shared access to resources in an automated way –A separate middleware layer –Robustness/resilience as standard –Flexibility & quick apps development via code reuse –Guest access for low infrastructure participants –Support for dynamic VOs and more permanent VOs