Hi Etienne, I think we have all agreed to drop the word "production" as it infers something that is very subjective. What I hope that we are nowdoing is identifying types of Grids. My proposal is that one type of Grid has the IGTF as trust anchor. As the I in IGTF standard for International this is also a key property. You have highlighted two other types of Grids, 'Service Grids' and 'Desktop Grids'. So we have now identified 5 different types Campus Grid, NGIs, Service Grids, Desktop Grids and Multi-institutional International Infrastructures for e-Science. The fact that we are using different words to describe these suggests that they are subtly different otherwise we could just use the word Grid. Laurence Etienne URBAH wrote:
Laurence and all,
Concerning the definition of a Production Grid :
Lot of thanks to Laurence for proposing the first definition, and for proposing 'Multi-institutional International Infrastructures for e-Science'.
Following David WALLOM, I think that 'International' is too restrictive. The key point is that a Production Grid spans institutional boundaries, which presents a whole load of policy and legal issues.
So I propose 'Multi-institutional Infrastructure for e-Science'.
Today, there can be Production Grids which do NOT use IGTF as trust anchor. But for interoperability, they will have to migrate and use IGTF as trust anchor.
Inside the EDGeS project, we think that 'Production Grids' encompass both 'Service Grids' and 'Desktop Grids'.
Shortly :
- A Service Grid (SG) is a managed grid of managed computing clusters, offering a guaranteed QoS (Quality of Service). Typically, institutions with their managed clusters can join to SGs if they sign a certain SLA (Service Level Agreement) with the leadership of the SG. Since participants to a SG are most often institutions, an SG is often called an 'Institutional Computing Grid'. Examples of such service grid infrastructures are EGEE, NorduGrid, OSG, DEISA, TeraGrid.
- A Desktop Grid (DG) is a loose opportunistic grid using idle resources. Inside desktop grids, computing and storage resources are typically owned by individual volunteer owners and not by institutes (therefore it is often called volunteer computing). Even if each single desktop computer provides a very low QoS, a desktop grid of reasonable size can, as a whole, provide a defined QoS and sign a SLA. Examples of such desktop grid systems are BOINC, XtremWeb, OurGrid, Xgrid.
You can find a full description with drawings in chapter 5 'Technological context of the EDGeS project' of EDGeS deliverable DNA3.1 at http://www.edges-grid.eu:8080/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=11065&folderId=27671&name=DLFE-1042.pdf
If you can NOT access this document, please let me now, I would then upload it to Gridforge.
Best regards.