Dear group,
as you know, we are currently in transition from a GGF
Research Group to a GGF Working Group, which will enable
us to submit documents into the standardization track.
The last action from our side was to submit the proposed
WG charter to our Area Directors (Steven and Dieter), and
wait for the last step in the process, the GFSG approval of
that charter.
Below you find the answer we got from the GFSG. I know
people will have strong opinions about that, both positive
and negative (well, certainly I do anyway :-P ), so we would
like to discuss the GFSG answer on this list. It would be
favourable to come to a group internal conclusion, and a
solid opinion, about the groups future before GGF16 - that
means within the next two weeks.
Best regards,
your friendly group chairs ;-)
----- Forwarded message from Steven Newhouse
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:38:45 +0000 From: Steven Newhouse
To: Andre Merzky , Shantenu Jha , Tom Goodale CC: Dieter Kranzlmueller Subject: Re: SAGA - WG? Dear Andre, Shantenu & Tom,
At the GFSG meeting last week, there was a general discussion as to how GFSG should/could steer the standards areas to increase the impact of GGF. One of the discussions related to the Applications area and how we (as Area Directors) could help to structure the activity to align work with activities in the Architecture (i.e. OGSA) area.
There was considerable interest from the rest of the GFSG in the SAGA activities and the potential uptake that the generation of stable client-side interfaces (and potentially command line tools that build on these interfaces) could provide. The GFSG saw SAGA-RG as an important step forward for grids being adopted by the wider community.
That's the good news!
We mentioned the pending SAGA-WG charter and that this was the next step to move things forward. Some concern was expressed about focus and broad scope. Especially as other domains would like to bring forward their own domains (data access, data movement, etc) for client side API standardisation.
One proposed solution to this is that SAGA-RG stays as it is. It is doing very valuable work collecting use cases, developing the strawman API that supports these use cases and discussing implementation issues through real experience. However, clearly there are elements within the strawman that are ready to move to the next level.
It is proposed that these aspects should be developed as standalone WG's starting with a common look and feel, and then picking up on (say) jobs & file movement to drive some domain specific applications of the common look and feel. The result would be an umbrella-RG (SAGA) with a set of coupled WGs for the different aspects.
So there are two ways forward - you have _our_ support which ever way _you_ choose to go forward.
If you go forward with then the current charter then you will need to be explicit as to which areas you will be doing (to allow space for other WG's to come forward), i.e. you need to define your API scope. Elements of the API will change at different rates and putting this all into one specification adds to its complexity. Small tightly focussed specifications have had much greater success within GGF. This may be something else to consider.
As a conclusion we hope that you will think about this great opportunity to take the responsibility for the bigger picture, and that you will adapt your plans accordingly from this feedback. We would certainly be available to support you in this quest. At the same time, it has also been agreed to continue the regular bit-flipping procedure with your charter, should you insist on your currently proposed approach.
Steven & Dieter -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Andre Merzky | phon: +31 - 20 - 598 - 7759 | | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) | fax : +31 - 20 - 598 - 7653 | | Dept. of Computer Science | mail: merzky@cs.vu.nl | | De Boelelaan 1083a | www: http://www.merzky.net | | 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+