Grids 2003The Great Academia/Industry Grid Debate

Dan Fay | Microsoft Research

Grid, grid, everywhere a Grid Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind Solve this! Don't use that! Can't you use the Grid?

(apologizes to the Five Man Electrical Band)

What is a Grid? “The Grid”?Everyone has a definition – Grid community, Scientists, Industry,

companies, products & customers

Are Grids only about computations?What does supporting “the Grid” mean? What does it mean to be Grid enabled? Ie. Internet enabled

Internet parallels – captures the imagination, as well as the naming

(ie. internet*****, .com, i****, e****, ****grid, etc)A lot of interest – a lot of hype

ie. “The Grid will solve it”

Internet – Standard protocols Easily implemented on any platform Wide spread industry support

Web Services are about making the Web/Internet programmable

Grids = “Internet-scale distributed computing” – Jim Gray

Web Services is the way to do Internet-scale distributed computing. Live examples –

TerraService – over 15 TB of images & dataTurned into a Web Service in 3 days – http://terraservice.net

SkyServer - Sloan Digital Sky Survey – map a large part of the universe – Federates Astronomy data from 10 DB’s around the worldSkyQuery http://www.skyquery.net/

Web Services moving forward (beyond SOAP, XML, & HTTP)Web Services Architecture - Reliable, Secure, & Transacted

Set of specifications (WS-*) from MS, IBM, and others to put more “smarts” at the application level – transport neutral

GGF9 Discussion around refactoring OGSI on top of Web Service specs

Grids are Web ServicesGet standardization and implemented specificationsDevelop on top of Web Services ArchitectureLeverage industry/commercial tools

Business issues around Grids

Beyond the Technical Issues Naming/Definitions Specifications

Build on "secure, reliable, transacted" Web services architecture

Business Issues - Possible Obstacles to wide spread adoptionDifferent from Academic & research issues

Business opportunity/justificationBusiness modelTrust / PrivacySecurity / IPSoftware licensing Batch vs real-time

“Can I or am I willing to run mission critical apps on the Grid?”“Will we allow external code to execute on internal resources?”

Will this limit “Grids” to inside Enterprises & Partner Grids?

MicrosoftWeb Services & Grids

Research activities OGSI on .NET - Univ of Virginia MS.NETGrid - UK National e-Science Center (EPCC) G2: A Grid Middleware for Cycle Donation using .NET - QUT