1. MDS4 Roadmap Items Laura Pearlman USC Information Sciences Institute

2. What is MDS4? l Monitoring and Discovery System l Resource discovery u finding resources in a VO that are available and suitable for applications l Resource monitoring u tracking the state of VO resources

3. MDS Services and Interfaces l Index Service u Collects aggregated information and responds to queries l Trigger Service u Collects aggregated information and performs actions when conditions are met l WebMDS u Provides access to formatted state data via a simple http interface l Information Providers u Gather information for use by the Index and Trigger services

4. Improved Test Infrastructure for Information Providers l Information providers are run by MDS services to gather and reformat information. This new framework will decouple the testing of the information gathering and reformatting aspects of information providers. l MDS services will be able to run info providers in three modes: Normal mode, in which they do what they do today. Debug mode, in which they do what they do today, but also save data they've collected in some standard place. Test mode, in which they skip the "gathering data" step and instead read the data from files created when they were run in debug mode. l Will make it easier to debug info providers remotely amd create unit tests for info providers.

5. Best Practices Guide for Information Provider Developers l Overall guide to writing an information provider, including: u How to take advantage of the new testing framework u Templates for creating documentation for the information provider

6. Index Service Scalability l Modify the Index Service to use a backend that is more scalable and efficient than the current in-memory XML database.

7. Archive Service Evaluation l The Index Service contains information about the recent state of Grid resources, but no historic information. l In 2007, we completed a prototype implementation of an Archive Service. l We will review the Archive Service concept with likely users and assess the usefulness. If the results justify it, we will make the Archive Service a production-quality product.