1. Building Components for Grid Interoperability
Stephen Brewer, Achim Streit Alistair Dunlop
University of Southampton Forschungszentrum Jülich

2. What is OMII-Europe OMII-Europe stands for
Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe
It involves 16 partners
8 EU (U-Southampton (coord.), Fujitsu Labs of Europe, KTH, INFN, PSNC, FZJ, U-Edinburgh, CERN)
4 USA (U-Chicago, NCSA, U-Southern California, U-Wisconsin)
4 China (Beihang U, China Institute of Computing Technology, Computer Network Information Centre, Tsinghua U)

3. Vision & Mission Vision
“e-Science having easy access and use of Grid resources in heterogeneous e-infrastructures crossing national, pan-European and global boundaries”
Mission
“Enabling of e-infrastructure interoperability by providing standards-based Grid middleware components leveraging existing work and activities”

4. Focus Achieving interoperability through common standards
Common standards is the long term solution
Significant involvement and success in OGF and OASIS
Implementations of standards in tandem with standards development on all middleware platforms

5. Approaches to Interoperability
Adapters-based:
The ability of Grid middleware to interact via adapters that translate the specific design aspects from one domain to another
Standard-based:
the native ability of Grid middleware to interact directly via well-defined interfaces and common open standards
* definition inspired by OGF GIN CG

6. Who Benefits from Interoperability?
Grid Developers
A single standard set of services on all Grid middleware systems
Applications portable across different Grid middleware systems
e-Science application users
Common ways for accessing any e-infrastructure resources
Potential access to a significantly larger set of resources
e-resource owners
Reduced management overheads as only a single Grid middleware system needs deployment
Potential for greater resource utilisation
“For the Grid to deliver on it’s promises interoperability needs to be taken for granted like network interoperability”

7. The Virtuous Cycle – Technology transfer with Grid projects and standards organisations
Standards Compliance Testing and QA
JRA2
SA2
New Components
Standards Implementation
JRA4
Components
JRA1 IN
Globus
Benchmarking
Repository
OUT
SA1
OMII-UK
Components
CROWN
Supported Components on Eval. Infrastructure
JRA3
Integrated Components
SA3

8. OMII-Europe Participation in Standardisation
Most project participants involved as member/observer in many OGF WG
11 project participant hold senior positions in
OGSA DAIS WG (Database Access and Integration Services)
OGSA RUS WG (Resource Usage Server)
OGSA BES WG (Basic Execution Service)
OGSA JSDL WG (Job Submission Description Language)
GRAAP WG (Grid Research Agreement Allocation Protocol)
OGSA DMI WG (Data Movement Interface)
GIN CG (Grid Interoperability Now)
OGSA-AuthZ-WG (Authorization)
GLUE WG
GFSG WG (Grid File System)
RM WG (Reference Model)
OGSA Naming WG
OGSA BYTE IO WG
OGSA D WG (Data)

9. What OMII-Europe is doing?
Initial focus on providing common interfaces and integration of major Grid software infrastructures
Common interoperable services:
Database Access
Virtual Organisation Management
Accounting
Job Submission and Job Monitoring
Infrastructure integration
Initial gLite/UNICORE/Globus interoperability
Interoperable security framework
Access these infrastructure services through a portal

10. Job Submission Unify Job Submission and Monitoring interface
Adoption of emerging OGSA-BES and JSDL standards
Alpha BES and JSDL implementations for
UNICORE 6, gLite 3.1, Globus 4, OMII-UK, CROWNgrid
Interoperability demonstrated through use of a BES compliant meta-scheduler

11. VO Management
To provide a common Virtual Organisation (VO) management solution across middleware distributions
Extend VOMS Interface to support emerging AuthZ standard
compliance with SAML Authorisation model
Extension, not a replacement interface
Public release of SAML-VOMS integrated with UNICORE 6

12. Accounting
Unify accounting information across middleware distributions
Provide standardized interfaces for accessing that information
Information standard: Usage Record Format (UR)
Service interface standard: Resource Usage Service (OGSA-RUS)
Alpha versions RUS
gLite (DGAS), Globus (SGAS), UNICORE

13. Data Access & Portal Data Access
Port OGSA-DAI 3.0 from Globus to other middleware distributions available throughout Europe and China
UNICORE, gLite, CROWN
Portal
Deliver tools for developing Grid portals and support for key Web and Grid standards and technologies
Objectives:
Develop gateway to OMII Evaluation Infrastructure
Develop tools for portal and grid software training
Explore new approaches for grid portal development

14. Infrastructure Integration
Putting all developments together and test them in a global scenario (e.g. secure job submission)

15. Repository of Open-Source Software
Make available software reengineered within OMII-Europe and contributed by third parties
Single services/tools & complete distributions
Provide an interface to select software from the repository based on user requirements
By capability/standards/provider/…
Support the upload, download and installation of the software
Document platform portability & pre-requisites
Verify the software through compliance & metrics tests
Using the ETICS software

16. New Services Activity
To identify capabilities which are missing from the OMII-Europe initial plans  implementation in 2nd year of the project
First Missing Piece: a Community-agreed Information Model for Computing Resources
Lack of a common description of Grid resources suitable for discovery, monitoring and scheduling
Many descriptions exist, e.g.: GLUE Schema, NorduGrid Schema
Working on the definition of next-generation GLUE 2 Information Model in the context of OGF GLUE WG and its implementation

17. What can you do Now… and Later…
Most products at Beta stage becoming publicly available
They provide basic interoperability of multiple grid middleware systems focusing on job execution
Available to early adopters working with OMII-Europe partners
Spring 2008 (end of current project)
Further security integration work between different middleware platforms (SAML-VOMS, TLS (Transport level security))
Completed QA’d services and demonstrated end-to-end solutions
Availability of GLUE 2 information model service implementations

18. Interoperability Scenario - WISDOM
Wide In Silico Docking On Malaria (WISDOM)
Developing new drugs for neglected and emerging diseases with a particular focus on malaria
Accelerated research & development and reduce costs
WISDOM already uses EGEE for large “in silico docking” tests
Methods to predict molecule bindings
Used software packages AutoDock and FlexX are offered via gLite in EGEE
Result: list of best compounds

19. Interoperability Scenario - WISDOM
Refine best compound list using MD (molecular dynamics) simulations
AMBER software is ideal for this
AMBER is a highly scalable code that runs highly efficient on close-coupled HPC systems
DEISA offers HPC resources
AMBER is available through UNICORE
How can scientists use both e-infrastructures to accelerate drug discovery, although different Grid technologies are used in EGEE and DEISA ?

20. slide courtesy of Morris Riedel

21. Summary
OMII-Europe establishes Grid infrastructure interoperability through implementing common open standards in major Grid middleware technologies
Implementing a number of components that will allow identically specified jobs to be run, managed and migrated to different middleware platforms
Initial versions of BES, VOMS/SAML and security service have already enabled UNICORE 6 and gLite managed resources to be used by the same job
Services can be obtained from the OMII-Europe repository
We anticipate OMII-Europe services to be integrated into standard middleware distributions as well as deployed on large scale e-infrastructures such as EGEE and DEISA

22. Further Information