1. Building components for Grid Interoperability
Stephen Brewer, Deputy Project Manager, OMII-Europe
OGF 23, Barcelona, 2nd June 2008

2. Outline What is OMII-Europe Overview of the project
Vision and Objectives
Approaches to Interoperability
Key project results

3. What is OMII-Europe OMII-Europe stands for
Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe
It was an EU-funded project: FP6, RI
It had a duration of 2 years
May > April 2008
It was granted a contribution of 8M €
It involved 16 partners
8 EU
4 USA
4 China

4. Partners Funded Unfunded University of Southampton (coordinator) UK
University of Chicago
USA
Fujitsu Laboratories Europe
NCSA, University of Illinois
Kungl Tekniska Högskolan
Sweden
University of Southern California,
Los Angeles
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
Italy
University of Wisconsin
Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center
Poland
Beihang University
China
Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ)
Germany
China Institute of Computing Technology, Beijing
University of Edinburgh
Computer Network Information Centre, Beijing
CERN, European Organisation for Nuclear Research
Switzerland
Tsinghua University

5. Project Structure and Effort Allocation
Networking activities
Management, Outreach, Training
8% Person Effort
Service Activities
Repository, QA, Support
25% Person Effort
Joint Research Activities
Re-engineering, new services, integration, benchmarking
67% Person Effort

6. Vision “ e-Science having easy access and use of Grid resources
in heterogeneous
e-infrastructures
crossing national,
pan-European
and global boundaries “

7. Mission “ Enabling of e-infrastructure interoperability by providing
standards-based
middleware components
leveraging existing work
and activities “

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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”

11. Participation in Middleware Standardisation
Most project participants were 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)
GIN CG (Grid Interoperability Now)
OGSA-AuthZ-WG (Authorization)
GLUE WG
GFSG WG (Grid File System)
RM WG (Reference Model)
OGSA Naming WG
Technical Standards Committee
GSA RG (Grid Scheduling Architecture)
GRAAP WG (Grid Research Agreement Allocation Protocol)
OGSA BYTE IO WG
OGSA D WG (Data)
OGSA DMI WG (Data Movement Interface)

12. OMII-Europe Guiding Principles
Committed to standards process
Implementing established open standards
Providing feedback to the standards process (e.g. OGF)
Quality Assurance
Published methodology and compliance test
All software components have public QA process and audit trail
Impartiality
OMII-Europe is “honest broker” providing impartial advice/information on e-infrastructures

13. 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

14. OMII-Europe project scope
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

15. Repository of Open-Source Software
Make available software reengineered within OMII-Europe and contributed by third parties
Single services/tools & complete distributions
Leverage existing infrastructure & projects
ETICS
Capture build & test configuration data for repeatability
NMI Build & Test Framework
Manage cross-platform environment for build & tests
Condor
Underlying execution infrastructure
Support and training was available

16. Standards status: May 2008 Accounting SGAS/DGAS/UNICORE-RUS
OGSA-Resource Usage Service (RUS – OGF draft specification) - implies:
Usage Record Format (UR) (OGF recommendation status awaiting implementation)
Job Submission and Job monitoring
CREAM-BES, GLOBUS-BES, UNICORE-BES
OGSA-Basic Execution Service (BES) version 1.0 (OGF final specification) – implies:
Job Submission Description Language (JSDL) version 1.0 (OGF final specification)
Database Access
OGSA-DAI
WS-DAIX and WS-DAIR are being implemented in OGSA-DAI (both currently OGF candidate standards at 1.0 awaiting implementation)
Virtual Organisation Membership Service
VOMS implements the following:
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Version 2.0 OASIS (March ’05)
Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) version 2.0 OASIS (February ’05)
Information modelling
GLUE 2.0
standard is currently draft, expected to go out for public comments by the end of April 2008, final version by September 2008

17. New Services: a Community-agreed Information Model for Computing Resources
OGSA-BES and JSDL are already considered by OMII-Europe
lacking a common description of Grid resources suitable for discovery, monitoring and scheduling
Working on the definition of next-generation GLUE Information Model in the context of OGF GLUE WG and its implementation
Grid components MUST be instrumented to expose GLUE 2.0-based description which is
Conformant with the spec
Conformant with the renderings
GLUEMan:
WBEM-based framework for managing providers to produce information according to the OGF GLUE 2.0 information model and to render them in different formats (XML, LDAP, SQL)
designed and implemented to simplify and speed up the adoption of GLUE 2.0

18. Key Project Results
Outreach and training have created a high project profile
OMII-Europe is seen as THE project delivering interoperability for grid middleware
Presentations at conferences, conference booths, tutorials
Project has delivered a substantial set of common services across multiple grid distributions
OGSA-DAI: GT4, UNICORE 6, gLite3, OMII-UK, CROWN
VOMS: GT4, UNICORE 6, gLite3
BES: GT4, UNICORE 6, gLite3, OMII-UK, CROWN
RUS: GT4, UNICORE 6, gLite3
GLUE2: UNICORE 6, gLite3 (both in development)
Repository and QA activities provide a persistent resource of evaluated software services
Integration activity continues to work with real end users
WISDOM, EU-IndiaGrid, EUFORIA, ...
At the mid term review I had a slide that said “OMII-Europe is highly influential in encouraging standards adoption, deployment of these standards and promoting and implementing e-infrastructure interoperability”. Much more now. 18 18

19. Further Information