But this is not so simple. The knee-jerk
reaction is to separate these two concerns into implementation vs. interface,
and develop each one independently. But taken to the extreme, a system that “appears”
to be rich in its capabilities might not be so in reality for some time (if
EVER!).
Let’s assume that we truly separate
these concerns and build “sophisticated interfaces. But then what about
the potential consumer of such services? Building an overly complex interface to
such a service (without any practical implementations behind it) might promote
further complicated clients (which promotes further complexity upstream…)
“Build the interface and they will come with implementations” is a
variation on a theme that doesn’t always come true. Arguably, complexity
is what we’re trying to get away from.
And no, I’m not advocating only an
interface that matches existing capabilities. I’m just saying that it’s
NOT obvious that the most effective approach is to entirely decouple these two
concerns.
-- Marty
From: Ian Foster
[mailto:foster@mcs.anl.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2006 1:34
PM
To: Marvin Theimer; Carl Kesselman
Cc: humphrey@cs.virginia.edu;
ogsa-wg@ggf.org; Marvin Theimer
Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] Paper
proposing "evolutionary vertical design efforts"
Marvin:
I think you are mixing two things together: the capabilities of the scheduler
and the capabilities of the remote submission interface. The proposal that we
submit at-most-once submission capabilities is a proposal for capabilities in
the remote submission interface, not the scheduler. I wouldn't expect existing
schedulers to provide this capability, just as they don't (for the most part)
support Web Services interfaces. But once we define a Web Services-based remote
submission interface, at-most-once submission capabilities become important.
Ian.
At 10:28 AM 3/21/2006 -0800, Marvin Theimer wrote:
Hi;
Whereas I agree with you that at-most-once semantics are very desirable, I
would like to point out that not all existing job schedulers implement
them. I know that both LSF and CCS (the Microsoft HPC job scheduler)
dont. Ive been trying to find out whether PBS and SGE do or dont.
So, this brings up the following slightly more general question: should the
simplest base case be the simplest case that does something useful, or should
it be more complicated than that? I can see good arguments on both sides:
·
Whittling things down to the simplest possible base case
maximizes the likelihood that parties can participate. Every feature
added represents one more feature that some existing system may not be able to
support or that a new system has to provide even when its not needed in the
context of that system. Suppose, for example, that PBS and SGE dont
provide transactional semantics of the type you described. Then 4 of the
6 most common job scheduling systems would not have this feature and would need
to somehow add it to their implementations. In this particular case it
might be too difficult to add in practice, but in general there might be
problems.
· On
the other hand, since there are many clients and arguably far fewer server
implementations, features that substantially simplify client
behavior/programming and that are not too onerous to implement in existing and
future systems should be part of the base case. The problem, of course,
is that this is a slippery slope at the end of which lies the number 42 (ignore
that last phrase if youre not a fan of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy).
Personally, the slippery slope argument makes me lean towards defining the
simplest possible base use case, since otherwise well spend a (potentially
very) long time arguing about which features are important enough to justify
being in the base case. One possible way forward on this issue is to have
people come up with lists of features that they feel belong in the base use
case and then we agree to include only those that have a large majority of the
community arguing for their inclusion in the base case.
Unfortunately defining what large majorityshould be is also not easy or
obvious. Indeed, one can argue that we cant even afford to let all votes
be equal. Consider the following hypothetical (and contrived) case: 100
members of a particular academic research community show up and vote that the
base case must include support for a particular complicated scheduling policy
and the less-than-ten suppliers of existing job schedulers with significant
numbers of users all vote against it. Should it be included in the base
case? What happens if the major scheduler vendors/suppliers decide that
they cant justify implementing it and therefore cant be GGF spec-compliant and
therefore go off and define their own job scheduling standard? The hidden
issue is, of course, whether those voting are representative of the overall HPC
user population. I cant personally answer that question, but it does
again lead me to want to minimize the number of times I have to ask that
question i.e. the number of features that I have to consider for inclusion in
the base case.
So this brings me to the question of next steps. Recall that the approach
Im advocating and that others have bought in to as far as I can tell is that we
define a base case and the mechanisms and approach to how extensions of the
base case are done. I assert that the absolutely most important part of
defining how extension should work is ensuring that multiple extensions dont end
up producing a hairball thats impossible to understand, implement, or
use. In practice this means coming up with a restricted form of extension
since history is pretty clear on the pitfalls of trying to support arbitrarily
general extension schemes.
This is one of the places where identification of common use cases comes
in. If we define the use cases that we think might actually occur then we
can ask whether a given approach to extension has a plausible way of achieving
all the identified use cases. Of course, future desired use cases might
not be achievable by the extension schemes we come up with now, but that
possibility is inevitable given anything less than a fully general extension
scheme. Indeed, even among the common use cases we identify now, we might
discover that there are trade-offs where a simpler (and hence probably more
understandable and easier to implement and use) extension scheme can cover 80%
of the use cases while a much more complicated scheme is required to cover 100%
of the use cases.
Given all this, here are the concrete next steps Id like to propose:
· Everyone
who is participating in this design effort should define what they feel should
be the HPC base use case. This represents the simplest use case and associated
features like transactional submit semantics that you feel everyone in the HPC grid world must
implement. We will take these use case candidates and debate which one to
actually settle on.
· Everyone
should define the set of HPC use cases that they believe might actually occur
in practice. I will refer to these as the common use cases, in contrast
to the base use case. The goal here is not to define the most general HPC
use case, but rather the more restricted use cases that might occur in real
life. For example, not all systems will support job migration, so whereas
a fully general HPC use case would include the notion of job migration, I argue
that one or more common use cases will not include job migration.
Everyone should also prioritize and rank their common use cases so that we can
discuss 80/20-style trade-offs concerning which use cases to support with any
given approach to extension. Thus prioritization should include the
notion of how common you think a use case will actually be, and hence how
important it will be to actually support that use case.
· Everyone
should start thinking about what kinds of extension approaches they believe we
should define, given the base use case and common use cases that they have
identified.
As multiple people have pointed out, an exploration of common HPC use cases has
already been done one or several times before, including in the
One very important point that Id like to raise is the following: Time is short
and bestis the enemy of good enough. Microsoft is planning to provide a
Web services-based interoperability interface to its job scheduler sometime in
the next year or two. I know that many of the other job scheduler
vendors/suppliers are also interested in having an interoperability story in
place sooner rather than later. To meet this schedule on the Microsoft
side will require locking down a first fairly complete draft of whatever design
will be shipped by essentially the end of August. That's so that we can
do all the necessary debugging, interoperability testing, security threat
modeling, etc. that goes with shipping an actual finished product. What
that means for the HPC profile work is that, come the end of August, Microsoft
and possibly other scheduler vendors/suppliers will need to lock down and start
coding some version of Web Services-based job scheduling and data transfer protocols.
If there is a fairly well-defined, feasible set of specs/profile coming out of
the GGF HPC working group (for recommendation NOT yet for actual standards
approval) that has some reasonable level of consensus by then, then that's what
Microsoft will very likely go with. Otherwise Microsoft will need to
defer the idea of shipping anything that might be GGF compliant to version 3 of
our product, which will probably ship about 4 years from now.
The chances of coming up with the bestHPC profile by the end of August are
slim. The chances of coming up with a fairly simple design that is good
enoughto cover the most important common cases by means of a relatively simple,
restricted form of extension seems much more feasible. Covering a richer
set of use cases would need to be deferred to a future version of the profile,
much in the manner that BES has been defined to cover an important sub-category
of use cases now, with a fuller
Marvin.
From: Carl Kesselman [mailto:carl@isi.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006
12:49 AM
To: Marvin Theimer
Cc: humphrey@cs.virginia.edu;
ogsa-wg@ggf.org
Subject: Re: [ogsa-wg] Paper
proposing "evolutionary vertical design efforts"
Hi,
In the interest of furthering agreement, I was not arguing that the application
had to be restartable. Rather, what has been shown to be important is that the
protocol be restartable in the following sense: if you submit a job and
the far and server fails, is the job running or not, if you resubmit, do you
get another job instance. The GT sumbission protocol and Condor have a
transactional semantics so that you can have at most once submit semantics
reegardless of client and server failures. The fact that your application may
be non-itempote is exactly why having a well defined semantics in this case is
important.
So what is the next step?
Carl
Dr. Carl
Kesselman
email: carl@isi.edu
USC/Information Sciences Institute
WWW: http://www.isi.edu/~carl
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite
1001 Phone:
(310) 448-9338
-----Original Message-----
From: Marvin Theimer <theimer@microsoft.com>
To: Carl Kesselman <carl@isi.edu>
CC: Marvin Theimer <theimer@microsoft.com>; Marty Humphrey
<humphrey@cs.virginia.edu>; ogsa-wg@ggf.org <ogsa-wg@ggf.org>
Sent: Wed Mar 15 14:26:36 2006
Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] Paper proposing "evolutionary vertical design
efforts"
Hi;
I suspect that were mostly in agreement on things. In particular, I think
your list of four core aspects is a great starting point for a discussion on
the topic.
I just replied to an earlier email from
· Identification of the simplest base
case that everyone will have to implement.
· Identification of common cases we
want to optimize.
· Identification of how evolution and
selective extension will work.
I totally agree with you that the base use case I described isnt really a
griduse case. But it is an HPC use case in fact it is arguably the most
common use case in current existence. J So I think its important that we
understand how to seamlessly integrate and support that common and very simple
use case.
I also totally agree with you that we cant let a solution to the simplest HPC
use case paint us into a corner that prevents supporting the richer use cases
that grid computing is all about. Thats why Id like to spend significant
effort exploring and understanding the issues of how to support evolution and
selective extension. In an ideal world a legacy compute cluster job
scheduler could have a simple grid shimthat let it participate at a basic
level, in a natural manner, in a grid environment, while smarter clients and
HPC services could interoperate with each other in various selectively richer
manners by means of extensions to the basic HPC grid design.
One place where I disagree with you is your assertion that everything needs to
be designed to be restartable. While thats a good goal to pursue Im not
convinced that you can achieve it in all cases. In particular, there are
at least two cases that I claim we want to support that arent restartable:
· We want to be able to run
applications that arent restartable; for example, because they perform
non-idempotent operations on the external physical environment. If such
an application fails during execution then the only one who can figure out what
the proper next steps are is the end user.
· We want to be able to include
(often-times legacy) systems that arent fault tolerant, such as simple small
compute clusters where the owners didnt think that fault tolerance was worth
paying for.
Of course any acceptable design will have to enable systems that are fault
tolerant to export/expose that capability. To my mind its more a matter
of ensuring that non-fault-tolerant systems arent excluded from participation
in a grid.
Other things we agree on:
· We should certainly examine what
remote job submission systems do. We should certainly look at existing
systems like Globus, Unicore, and Legion. In general, we should be
looking at everything that has any actual experience that we can learn from and
everything that is actually deployed and hence represents a system that we
potentially need to interoperate with. (Whether a final design is
actually able to interoperate at any but the most basic level with various
exotic existing systems is a separate issue.)
· We should absolutely focus on
codifying what we know how to do and avoid doing research as part of a
standards process. I believe that thinking carefully about how to support
evolution and extension is our best hope for allowing people to defer trying to
bake their pet research topic into standards since it provides a story for why
todays standards dont preclude tomorrows improvements.
So I would propose that next steps are:
· Continue to explore and classify
various HPC use cases of various differing levels of complexity.
· Describe the requirements and
limitations of existing job scheduling and remote job submission systems.
· Continue identifying and discussing
key featuresof use cases and potential design solutions, such as the four that
you identified in your last email.
Marvin.
________________________________
From: Carl Kesselman [mailto:carl@isi.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 7:50 AM
To: Marty Humphrey; ogsa-wg@ggf.org
Cc: Marvin Theimer
Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] Paper proposing "evolutionary vertical design
efforts"
Hi,
Just to be clear, Im not trying to suggest that the scope be expanded. I agree
with the approach of focusing on a baby step is a good one, and many of the
assumptions stated in Marvins list I am in total agreement with. However, in
taking baby steps I think that it is important that we end up walking, and that
in defining the use case, one can easily create solutions that will not get you
to the next step. This is my point about looking at what we know how to do and
have been doing in production settings for many years now. In my mind, one of
the scope grandness problems has been that there has been far too little focus
on codifying what we know how to do in favor of using a standards process as an
excuse to design new things. So at the risk of sounding partisan, the
simplified use case that Marvin is proposing is exactly the use case that GRAM
has been doing for over ten years now (I think the same can be said about
UNICORE and Legion).
So let me try to be constructive. One of the things that falls out
of Marvins list could be a set of basic concepts/operations that need to be
defined. These include:
1) A way of describing localjob configuration, i.e. where to find the
executable, data files, etc. This should be very conservative with its
assumptions on shared file systems and accessibility. In general, what needs to
be stated here are what are the underlying aspects of the underlying resource
that are exposed to the outward facing interface.
2) A way of naming a submission point (should probably have a way of modeling
queues).
3) A core set of job management operations, submit, status, kill. These need to
be defined in such a way at to be tolerate to a variety of failure scenarios,
in that the state needs to be well defined in the case of failure.
4) A state model that one can use to describe what is going on with the jobs
and a way to access that state. Can be simple (queued, running, done),
may need to be extensible. One can view the accounting information as
being exposed
So, one thing to do would be to agree that these are (or are not) the right
four things that need to be defined and if so, start to flesh out these in a
way that supports the core use case but doesnt introduce assumptions that would
preclude more complex use cases in the future.
Carl
________________________________
From: owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org [mailto:owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org]
On Behalf Of Marty Humphrey
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 6:32 AM
To: ogsa-wg@ggf.org
Cc: 'Marvin Theimer'
Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] Paper proposing "evolutionary vertical design efforts"
Carl,
Your comments are very important. We would love to have your active
participation in this effort. Your experience is, of course, matched by few!
I re-emphasize that this represents (my words, not anyone elses) baby stepsthat
are necessary and important for the Grid community. In my opinion, the
biggest challenge will be to fight the urge to expand the scope beyond a small
size. You cannot ignore the possibility that the GGF has NOT made as much
progress as it should have to date. Furthermore, one such plausible explanation
is that the scope is too grand.
-- Marty
________________________________
From: owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org [mailto:owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org]
On Behalf Of Carl Kesselman
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 8:47 AM
To: Marvin Theimer; Ian Foster; ogsa-wg@ggf.org
Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] Paper proposing "evolutionary vertical design
efforts"
Hi,
While I have no wish to engage in the what is a Gridargument, there are some
elements of your base use case that I would be concerned about.
Specifically, the assumption that the submission in into a local clusteron
which there is an existing account may lead one to a solution that may not
generalize to the solution to the case of submission across autonomous policy
domains. I would also argue that ignoring issues of fault tolerance from
the beginning is also problematic. One must at least design operations
that are restartable (for example at most once submission semantics).
I would finally suggest that while examining existing job schedule systems is a
good thing to do, we should also examine existing remote submission systems
(dare I say Grid systems). The basic HPC use case is one in which there
is a significant amount implementation and usage experience.
Thanks,
Carl
________________________________
From: owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org [mailto:owner-ogsa-wg@ggf.org]
On Behalf Of Marvin Theimer
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 2:42 PM
To: Ian Foster; ogsa-wg@ggf.org
Cc: Marvin Theimer
Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] Paper proposing "evolutionary vertical design
efforts"
Hi;
Ian, you are correct that I view job submission to a cluster as being one of
the simplest, and hence most basic, HPC use cases to start with. Or, to
be slightly more general, I view job submission to a black boxthat can run jobs
be it a cluster or an SMP or an SGI NUMA machine or what-have-you as being the
simplest and hence most basic HPC use case to start with. The key
distinction for me is that the internals of the boxare for the most part not
visible to the client, at least as far as submitting and running compute jobs
is concerned. There may well be a separate interface for dealing with
things like system management, but I want to explicitly separate those things
out in order to allow for use of boxesthat might be managed by proprietary
means or by means obeying standards that a particular job submission client is
unfamiliar with.
I think the use case that Ravi Subramaniam posted to this mailing list back on
2/17 is a good one to start a discussion around. However, Id like to
present it from a different point-of-view than he did. The manner in
which the use case is currently presented emphasizes all the capabilities and
services needed to handle the fully general case of submitting a batch job to a
computing utility/service. Thats a great way of producing a taxonomy
against which any given system or design can be compared to see what it has to
offer. I would argue that the next step is to ask whats the simplest
subset that represents a useful system/design and how should one categorize the
various capabilities and services he has identified so as to arrive at
meaningful components that can be selectively used to obtain progressively more
capable systems.
Another useful exercise to do is to examine existing job scheduling systems in
order to understand what they provide. Since in the real world we will
have to deal with the legacy of existing systems it will be important to
understand how they relate to the use cases we explore. In the same vein,
it will be important to take into account and understand other existing
infrastructures that people use that are related to HPC use cases. Im
thinking of things like security infrastructures, directory services, and so
forth. From the point-of-view of managing complexity and reducing
total-cost-of-ownership, it will be important to understand the extent to which
existing infrastructure and services can be reused rather than reinvented.
To kick off a discussion around the topic of a minimalist HPC use case, I
present a straw man description of such below and then present a first attempt
at categorizing various areas of extension. The categorization of
extension areas is not meant to be complete or even all that carefully
thought-out as far as componentization boundaries are concerned; it is merely
meant to be a first contribution to get the discussion going.
A basic HPC use case: Compute cluster embedded within an organization.
· This is your basic batch job scheduling
scenario. Only a very basic state transition diagram is visible to the
client, with the following states for a job: queued, running, finished.
Additional states -- and associated state transition request operations and
functionality -- are not supported. Examples of additional states and
associated functionality include suspension of jobs and migration of jobs.
· Only "standard" resources can be described,
for example: number of cpus/nodes needed, memory requirements, disk
requirements, etc. (think resources that are describable by JSDL).
· Once a job has been submitted it can be cancelled,
but its resource requests can't be modified.
· A distributed file system is accessible from client
desktop machines and client file servers, as well as compute nodes of the
compute cluster. This implies that no data staging is required, that
programs can be (for the most part) executed from existing file system
locations, and that no program "provisioning" is required (since you
can execute them from wherever they are already installed). Thus in this
use case all data transfer and program installation operations are the
responsibility of the user.
· Users already have accounts within the existing
security infrastructure (e.g. Kerberos). They would like to use these and
not have to create/manage additional authentication/authorization credentials
(at least at the level that is visible to them).
· The job scheduling service resides at a well-known
network name and it is aware of the compute cluster and its resources by
"private" means (e.g. it runs on the head node of the cluster and
employs private means to monitor and control the resources of the
cluster). This implies that there is no need for any sort of directory
services for finding the compute cluster or the resources it represents other
than basic DNS.
· Compute cluster system management is opaque to users
and is the concern of the compute cluster's owners. This implies that
system management is not part of the compute cluster's public job scheduling
interface. This also implies that there is no need for a logging
interface to the service. I assume that application-level logging can be
done by means of libraries that write to client files; i.e. that there is no
need for any sort of special system support for logging.
· A simple polling-based interface is the simplest form
of interface to something like a job scheduling service. However, a
simple call-back notification interface is a very useful addition that
potentially provides substantial performance benefits since it can enable the
avoidance of lots of unnecessary network traffic. Only job state changes
result in notification messages.
· There are no notions of fault tolerance. Jobs
that fail must be resubmitted by the client. Neither the cluster head
node nor its compute nodes are fault tolerant. I do expect the client
software to return an indication of failure-due-system-fault when appropriate.
(Note that this may also occur when things like network partitions occur.)
· One does need some notion of how to deal with
orphaned resources and jobs. The notion of job lifetime and
post-expiration garbage collection is a natural approach here.
· The scheduling service provides a fixed set of
scheduling policies, with only a few basic choices (or maybe even just one),
such as FIFO or round-robin. There is no notion, in general, of SLAs
(which are a form of scheduling policy).
· Enough information must be returned to the client
when a job finishes to enable basic accounting functionality. This means
things like total wall-clock time the job ran and a summary of resources
used. There is not a need for the interface to support any sort of
grouping of accounting information. That is, jobs do not need to be
associated with projects, groups, or other accounting entities and the job
scheduling service is not responsible for tracking accounting information
across such entities. As long as basic resource utilization information
is returnable for each job, accounting can be done externally to the job
scheduling service. I do assume that jobs can be uniquely identified by
some means and can be uniquely associated with some principal entity existing
in the overall system, such as a user name.
· Just as there is no notion of requiring the job
scheduling service to track any but the most basic job-level accounting
information, there is no notion of the service enforcing quotas on jobs.
· Although it is generally useful to separate the
notions of resource reservation from resource usage (e.g. to enable interactive
and debugging use of resources), it is not a necessity for the most basic of
job scheduling services.
· There is no notion of tying multiple jobs together,
either to support things like dependency graphs or to support things like
workflows. Such capabilities must be implemented by clients of the job
scheduling service.
Interesting extension areas:
· Additional scheduling policies
o Weighted fair-share, &
o Multiple queues
o SLAs
o ...
· Extended resource descriptions
o Additional resource types, such as GPUs
o Additional types of compute resources, such as
desktop computers
o Condor-style class ads
· Extended job descriptions (as returned to
requesting clients and sys admins)
· Additional classes of security credentials
· Reservations separated from execution
o Enabling interactive and debugging jobs
o Support for multiple competing schedulers (incl.
desktop cycle stealing and market-based approaches to scheduling compute
resources)
· Ability to modify jobs during their existence
· Fault tolerance
o Automatic rescheduling of jobs that failed due to
system faults
o Highly available resources: This is partly a
policy statement by a scheduling service about its characteristics and partly
the ability to rebind clients to migrated service endpoints
· Extended state transition diagrams and
associated functionalities
o Job suspension
o Job migration
o &
· Accounting & quotas
· Operating on arrays of jobs
· Meta-schedulers, multiple schedulers, and
ecologies and hierarchies of multiple schedulers
o Meta-schedulers
· Hierarchical job scheduling with a
meta-scheduler as the only entry point; forwarding jobs to the meta-scheduler
from other subsidiary schedulers
o Condor-style matchmaking
· Directory services
o Using existing directory services
o Abstract directory service interface(s)
· Data transfer topics
o Application data staging
· Naming
· Efficiency
· Convenience
· Cleanup
o Program staging/provisioning
· Description
· Installation
· Cleanup
Marvin.
________________________________
From: Ian Foster [mailto:foster@mcs.anl.gov]
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 9:20 AM
To: Marvin Theimer; ogsa-wg@ggf.org
Cc: Marvin Theimer; Savas Parastatidis; Tony Hey; Marty Humphrey;
gcf@grids.ucs.indiana.edu
Subject: Re: [ogsa-wg] Paper proposing "evolutionary vertical design
efforts"
Dear All:
The most important thing to understand at this point (IMHO) is the scope of
this "HPC use case," as this will determine just how minimal we can
be.
I get the impression that the principal goal may be "job submission to a
cluster." Is that correct? How do we start to circumscribe the scope more
explicitly?
Ian.
At 05:45 AM 2/16/2006 -0800, Marvin Theimer wrote:
Enclosed is a paper that advocates an additional set of activities that the
authors believe that the OGSA working groups should engage in.
Broadly speaking, the OGSA and related working groups are already doing a bunch
of important things:
· There is broad exploration of
the big picture, including enumeration of use cases, taxonomy of areas,
identification of research issues, etc.
· There is work going on in
each of the horizontal areas that have been identified, such as
· There is working going around
individual specifications, such as BES, JSDL, etc.
Given that individual specifications are beginning to come to fruition, the
authors believe it is time to also start defining vertical profilesthat
precisely describe how groups of individual specifications should be employed
to implement specific use cases in an interoperable manner. The authors
also believe that the process of defining these profiles offers an opportunity to
close the design loopby relating the various on-going protocol and standards
efforts back to the use cases in a very concrete manner. This provides an
end-to-end setting in which to identify holes and issues that might require
additional protocols and/or (incremental) changes to existing protocols.
The paper introduces both the general notion of doing focused vertical design
effortsand then focuses on a specific vertical design effort, namely a minimal
HPC design.
The paper derives a specific HPC design in a first principlesmanner since the
authors believe that this increases the chances of identifying issues. As
a consequence, existing specifications and the activities of existing working
groups are not mentioned and this paper is not an attempt to actually define a
specifications profile. Also, the absence of references to existing work
is not meant to imply that such work is in any way irrelevant or
inappropriate. The paper should be viewed as a first abstract attempt to
propose a new kind of activity within OGSA. The expectation is that
future open discussions and publications will explore the concrete details of
such a proposal.
This paper was recently sent to a few key individuals in order to get feedback
from them before submitting it to the wider GGF community. Unfortunately
that process took longer than intended and some members of the community may
have already seen a copy of the paper without knowing the context within it was
written. This email should hopefully dispel any misconceptions that may
have occurred.
For those people who will be around on for the F2F meetings on Friday, Marvin
Theimer will be giving a talk on the contents of this paper at a time and place
to be announced.
Marvin Theimer, Savas Parastatidis, Tony Hey, Marty Humphrey, Geoffrey Fox
_______________________________________________________________
Ian
Foster
www.mcs.anl.gov/~foster
Math & Computer Science Div. Dept of Computer Science
Argonne National Laboratory The
Tel: 630 252
4619
Fax: 630 252 1997
Globus Alliance, www.globus.org <http://www.globus.org/>
Math & Computer Science Div. Dept of
Computer Science
Argonne National Laboratory The
Tel: 630 252
4619
Fax: 630 252 1997
Globus
Alliance, www.globus.org