Dave (and all), Here's a draft to replace section 1.3. I'll incorporate any feedback I get by tomorrow and check in an updated version of the document. I haven't really thought about the other sections of the opening, but I will do so. Best, chris ----------- The long-term vision of Grid can be summed up as follows: "Distributed computing across multiple administrative domains." The notion of distributed computing as used in this definition includes a wealth of highly complex technologies, some still the focus of research. This definition complicates matters further by including operation across multiple domains of administrative control. The security, privacy, economic and political aspects of Grids increase significantly with the introduction of multiple administrative domains. The concept of Grid has grown from serendipitous cycle recovery projects such as SETI@Home, to planned desktop cycle sharing via tools such as Condor, to Grids built on dedicated resources, ranging from blade servers in a corporate data center to trans-national collections of supercomputers. Our focus is on standards and tools to effectively build and utilize the last of these. We believe that Grid is composed from the following characteristics and goals: - infrastructure virtualization - resource pooling & sharing - self monitoring & improvement - dynamic resource provisioning - highest quality of service Not all of these are in every Grid, but every Grid has several of them. We find that it is helpful to use a taxonomy of different "Grids" in discussions. This is not a strict taxonomy such as used by botanists, but instead a shorthand notation that points toward a particular usage style: - Collaboration Grids. These Grids involve multiple organizations and individuals, security domains, protocols, discovery mechanisms, and heterogeneous hardware, collaborating to share their resources to make the most effective use of it for their combined user communities. This is the original and long-term vision of Grids. - Data Center Grids. These Grids are in most ways as complete technically as Collaboration Grids and involve the complete dynamic life cycle of service deployment, provisioning, management and decommissioning as part of their normal operation. At first glance, they may appear to be missing the aspect of multiple administrative domains, but that is typically an illusion. While the funding may come from a single source, and the administration carried out by a single organization, there is typically just as much tension among the various user entities as in a Collaboration Grid. For example, in the Utility Computing use case, a Data Center Grid exists inside a single Enterprise, but provides services for many individual political/security domains on an infrastructure managed with grid protocols, subject to varying service level agreements and payment schemes. This results in multiple domains sitting on top of an integrated domain, with a complex hierarchy of security constraints, resource lifetimes and performance requirements. - Cluster Grids. Aimed at high performance/throughput computing, these Grids are mostly workload scheduling environments. They tend to be less dynamically deployed and more homogeneous in their construction. Their services are either generic in nature, e.g., a job submission service, or provide the same service all the time. The provisioning decisions may be almost entirely driven by service level agreements for a fixed set of services and customers. They do not typically support the whole service provisioning life cycle. It is perhaps better to think of these (and others) as a set of perspectives, taken from different points against the same vision of Grid as a pervasive, shared, integrated platform. Much of the work of the OGF has its origins in the ongoing efforts taken from the GGF and EGA actiities. Although OGF remains open to new and innovative approaches to Grid computing, much (but by no means all) of the work outlined here has been underway for some time as part of either the "Open Grid Services Architecture" or the "Reference Model and Use Cases". These two bodies of work continue to inform and guide our strategy going forward. -----Original Message-----
From David Snelling <david.snelling@uk.fujitsu.com> Sent Mon 11/27/2006 8:38 AM To Chris Kantarjiev <CHRIS.KANTARJIEV@oracle.com> Cc TSC <tsc@ogf.org> Subject Re: [tsc] comments from a relative newbie
Chris, In a chat with Mark today, we rationalized that it is unlikely that many changes are possible in the TSC Document before the end of the week. However, the opening section (1.3 in particular) seems to be important to the BoD and others. I like your thoughts here on refining the definition/attributes of different notions of Grid. Can I ask you to have a go at editing this section before the end of the week?