Paul Messina

Ruminations on Grids

Paul MessinaCenter for Advanced Computing Research

California Institute of Technology

February 18, 2002

Paul Messina

GGF External Advisory Committee (GFAC)

• Current GFAC– Frederica Darema (US NSF)– Bill Feiereisen (LANL)– Fabrizio Gagliardi (CERN)– John Hurley (CAU)– Paul Messina (Caltech)[chair]– Yoichi Muraoka (Waseda Univ)– Alexander Reinefeld (ZIB)– Rick Stevens (ANL)

• Proposed New Members– Irving Wladawsky-Berger

(IBM)– Tony Hey (UK)– Mary Anne Scott (US

DOE)– Sangsan Lee (KISTI)– Kyriakos Baxevanidis

(EU/CEC)

Paul Messina

GFAC Role

• GFAC provides external advice on strategy to the GGF chair and GFSG

• GFAC annually reviews the performance of the GGF chair and approves appointment or reappointment of the GGF chair every 3 years– GFSG nominates chair candidates

Paul Messina

Issues GFAC deals with

• Community and regional representation in GFAC and GFSG

• Size of leadership team (GFSG)• Making the GGF standards process a success

– e.g., ways of incentivizing writing detailed proposals and position papers

• Relationships with other activities such as Peer-to-Peer Working Group and New Productivity initiative

Paul Messina

P2P

• Peer-to-peer computing is the sharing of computer resources and services by direct exchange between systems– These resources and services include the exchange of

information, processing cycles, cache storage, and disk storage for files

• The Peer-to-Peer Working Group was organized to facilitate and accelerate the advancement of infrastructure best-known practices for peer-to-peer computing

Paul Messina

NPi

• NPi’s primary goal is to specify a set of standards for effective interoperability across the Distributed Resource Management (DRM) space

• With DRM standards in place it will be easier to build efficient, multi-vendor distributed computing solutions

• NPi is an open, industry-wide group of leading system vendors, independent software vendors and service providers

Paul Messina

Web services or Grid middleware?

• Isn’t it both, because each provides something?

• When a technology has mass markets, it’s a good idea to use it where possible– so we should explore the use of Web services in the

context of Grids and GGF activities– some Grid application projects provide a testing ground

• Which one “wins?”– wrong question: success is that eventually there is no

distinction between the two

Paul Messina

Lessons from the past

• As my gray beard indicates, I am old enough to have been involved in Grid-like “stuff” for some time– CASA– I-Way– SF Express– The Grid bandwagon

• my evangelism fed back to me

Paul Messina

The Grid and the Web

• As the Web became an everyday tool for “everyone,” the Grid concept became easy to explain – Web users became familiar with accessing remote

resources– typically the resources accessed are static documents

but some are dynamic. – Consequently, the idea of harnessing major remote

computational and data resources was no longer quite so foreign.

Paul Messina

The Grid and the Web (2)

• Second, most institutions installed higher speed connections to the internet as demand increased and prices fell

• Third, researchers began to put more and more data collections on line and accessible to others, – facilitated by the additional trend of rapidly decreasing

data storage costs

Paul Messina

Some other standards activities

• Ada– a standard without experience to back it

• F77– not much new beyond F66– In 1974, X3J3 said it was already too late for new

proposals to be considered– Stu Feldman’s f77 proved to be quite useful!

Paul Messina

Some other standards activities (2)

• MPI became a de facto standard at least ten years after initial attempts to standardize message-passing libraries– once the community was ready, process took a small number

of years• compare with F77

– although de facto, MPI has been widely adopted and deployed by industry

• with MPICH serving as the foundation of most initial vendor implementations

– is GGF ten years too early?• nahh

Paul Messina

So?

• Standardization needs to come at the right time in the life cycle of a new technology

• Reference implementations are extremely important and useful

Paul Messina

Insomnia

• The Grid is a premier example of applications-driven R&D inspired by the confluence of several technological trends– applications push and technology pull, great stuff

• But applications projects starting to say they have a job to do, it’s too late to take a long-range approach, they must focus on solving their problems by whatever local optimizations they can devise

Paul Messina

Insomnia (2)

• Many, many Grid projects world-wide– this is good

• Very high expectations of quick success– this is scary– difficult to erase negative initial impressions

Paul Messina

Summary• We have many challenges as we try to craft

standards at the same time as operational, production Grids are being implemented– and the general computing environment is evolving rapidly

• Somehow we need to strike the right balance between elegance and timeliness, between innovation and exploiting existing technologies

• Writing and critiquing proposals is important, as is developing reference implementations

Paul Messina

GGF Town Meeting- Wednesday

• GGF Leadership and Structure– Managing Growth

• Membership Program – Toward A Grid Professional Society

• GGF, Incorporated– Current and Planned GGF Support Infrastructure

• Plans for GGF Future Venues and Events– Beyond GGF6…