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 profiles” that 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 loop” by 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 efforts” and then focuses on a specific vertical design
effort, namely a minimal HPC design.
The paper derives a
specific HPC design in a “first principles” manner 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,