1. What is OGSA? GGF17 OGSA and Alternative Grid Architectures Panel
Tokyo Japan
May
Geoffrey Fox
Computer Science, Informatics, Physics
Pervasive Technology Laboratories
Indiana University Bloomington IN 47401

2. Trying to understand OGSA
What features of process or specification characterizes components of the OGSA architecture?
Is OGSA a “bag of services” produced by GGF from which I can pick and choose and produce profiles within OGSA or just build a Grid
Or is it a complete “architecture”
Does an OGSA standard have certain key features
e.g. builds on WSRF and/or WS-Naming and /or WS-I+?
Does OGSA have well defined requirements?
At what level of detail are requirements specified
How do lessons from many successful Grid projects feed into OGSA?
e.g. It is said that requirements drove development of WSRF – maybe but then what is defective in Web Service-based Grids not using WSRF
Other standards activities suggest distributed computing is very complex and rapidly changes
What is a realistic scope for OGSA?

3. Summary of OGSA from GCF’s eye
Hiro’s talk this and the webcast gives a very good summary and this is a very helpful development
OGSA carves up service space into 6 areas in a reasonable but non-unique fashion (another different decomposition developed by DoD for example)
Execution Requirements Identified – Good progress
Data – Interesting good progress but important issues not addressed
Information – Requirements and services unclear
Security – OGSA one player in a complex field
Resource-Management -- Active Research
Self-Management – Active Research

4. OGSA Issues
OGSA presents a complete picture that does not clearly distinguish between maturity, relevance of outside activities, and clarity of definition of 6 components
OGSA is open to those that join OGSA
Monolithic picture makes it hard for others making different choices to contribute
The gathering of use cases and analysis of them is not transparent and mechanism for outside (to OGSA) input unclear.
Many Grids – including those that I work on -- need some things (e.g. BES OGSA-DAI) from OGSA but also capabilities (such as SRB style services and real-time streams) that are not clearly addressed
Students are getting PhD’s in areas like service management that suggest they are research issues
Profiles (such as HPC Profile) select a few OGSA specifications and build around them and perhaps work of those outside OGSA
Does not require a monolithic approach

5. OGSA Suggestions
OGSA becomes a GGF process that develops (a bag of) generically important Grid services that can be taken or not on an individual basis
Most W3C and OASIS specifications are standalone and are not a “take it or leave it” monolithic system
OGSA identify those services/specifications (like BES) where requirements and GGF activities are well developed
OGSA define key features that an OGSA named activity must satisfy
The driving requirements be identified and the process for developing them separated from standards generation
Analyze success of many existing Grids – how did they succeed without using OGSA?
Analyze missing capabilities both internally and externally (Grid interoperation)
OGSA be clearly open to new contributors by not appearing to prescribe approach to service areas not currently well developed
Keep it simple and develop incrementally

6. DoD Net Centric Core Services
NCOW Service or Feature
WS-* Service area
GGF Areas
Others
CES 1: Enterprise Services Management
WS-8 Management
Management
CIM
CES 2: Information Assurance(IA)/Security
WS-5
WS-Security
Security (Authorization)
Grid-Shib, Permis Liberty Alliance etc.
CES 3: Messaging
WS-2, WS-3
Service Internet
Notification
NaradaBrokering, Streaming/Sensor Technologies
CES 4: Discovery
WS-6 UDDI
Extended UDDI
CES 5: Mediation
WS-4 Workflow
Treatment of Legacy systems. Data Transformations
CES 6: Collaboration
Shared Web Resources
Asynchronous Virtual Organizations
XGSP, Shared Web Service ports, Anabas
CES 7: User assistance
WS-10 Portlets
GridSphere
NCOW Capability Interfaces, JSR168
CES 8: Storage (not real-time streams)
Data
NCOW Data Strategy
CES 9: Application
Applications
Best Practice in building Grid/Web services (proxy or direct)
Environmental Control Services ECS
WS-9 Policy