EGEE ‘s Strategy on Grid and Web Services

1. EGEE ‘s Strategy on Grid and Web Services Fabrizio Gagliardi Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute Steering Committee (OMIISC) Meeting London, January 19, 2005

2. EGEE Partners • 71 leading institutions in 27 countries, federated in regional Grids • 32 M Euros EU funding (2004-5), O(100 M) total budget • Aiming for a combined capacity of over 20’000 CPUs (one of the largest international Grid infrastructures ever assembled) • ~ 300 dedicated staff OMIISC, London

3. EGEE Activities • 48 % service activities (Grid Operations, Support and Management, Network Resource Provision) • 24 % middleware re-engineering (Quality Assurance, Security, Network Services Development) • 28 % networking (Management, Dissemination and Outreach, User Training and Education, Application Identification and Support, Policy and International Cooperation) Emphasis in EGEE is on operating a production grid and supporting the end-users OMIISC, London

4. Country providing resources Country anticipating joining EGEE/LCG In EGEE-0 (LCG-2): • 91 sites • >9000 cpu • ~5 PB storage Computing Resources – Dec. 2004 OMIISC, London

5. Pilot New Deployment of Applications • Pilot applications • High Energy Physics • Biomed applications • Generic applications –Deployment under way • Computational Chemistry • Earth science research • EGEODE: first industrial application • Astrophysics • With interest from • Hydrology • Seismology • Grid search engines • Stock market simulators • Digital video etc. OMIISC, London

6. EGEE Grid strategy • Continue to deploy and operate a production oriented Grid infrastructure application agnostic • Validation performed by Biomedical and HEP applications • Interoperability with other major Grid international infrastructures (OSG in the US, NorduGrid etc.) • Supporting new Grid infrastructure consortia being created in Baltic countries, Mediterraneum bacin, Latino America and Asia (Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore…) • Supporting new Virtual Organisations (implement the EGEE “virtuous cycle”) • Developing a long term sustainability plan OMIISC, London

7. EGEE Standards Activities • EGEE is active in several standardisation and forum bodies (e.g. IETF, OASIS, GGF, OMII) • Interesting standards we are currently tracking include WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-Notification, WS-Agreement, WSRF, SRM, GMA, GFS, JSDLWS-Trust, SAML, XACML… • EGEE is mainly a consumer (user) of basic standards (e.g. WS-*) • Actively contributing to best practices (e.g. SRM) which may evolve into standards OMIISC, London

8. EGEE and eIRG • EGEE strongly supports the work of the eInfrastructures Reflection Group (eIRG), which is a forum for practitioners and policymakers exchange information about state of the art of the technology and policy-level issues that need to be solved. The support consists of: • Editorial support (Fotis Karayannis) • "Virtual Office" support at CERN • Active involvement in the startup phases of each White Paper project together with the eIRG steering committee and EU representative. • eIRG is exploring a closer relation to ESFRI • http://www.e-irg.org/ OMIISC, London

9. EGEE Concertation Activities • EGEE participated in the European Grid Technology Days 2004, an IST-FP6 Grid Projects Launch and Concertation event in Brussels, Sept. 2004http://www.nextgrid.org/events/ • EGEE hosted the First Concertation Meeting on eInfrastructures with participation from both Grid research and infrastructure project groupsin The Hague, The Netherlands, Nov. 2004http://public.eu-egee.org/concertation/ OMIISC, London

10. Web Service Standards • The promise from Web-Services is huge – e.g. • Seamless integration between heterogeneous systems over the Internet • Self-described API and automatic client generation (multi-languages) • Strong model for rich and clear semantics (security, policy, etc) • Strong support from the industry (e.g. Microsoft, IBM), which in turn promises the development of good tools • Few Web-Service standards are stable and have production quality tooling support for a variety of languages • Web-Services are still to be proven as a viable solution in a production quality environment OMIISC, London

11. gLite and Web-Services • EGEE is about production, not R&D • EGEE has to deploy production quality middleware now • We believe that Web-Services will be a key technology for gLite (EGEE Grid middleware) • Since standards haven’t solidified yet, EGEE is however taking a cautious approach towards WS-* • We are committed to WS-I (Basic Profile) compliance to maximise interoperability • More WS-* standards will be used as their maturity is demonstrated OMIISC, London

12. gLite and Web-Services roadmap • gLite v1 (expected in March 2005) will have services partially exposing Web-Service interfaces • Data management • Logging and Bookkeeping • CE (partially) • More services will expose WS interfaces in future releases • Current security solution is based on TLS (SOAP over HTTPS) • due to performance reasons • due to lack of support (e.g. no good WS-Security for Perl clients) • We are actively pursuing MLS based solutions (e.g. WS-Security) OMIISC, London

13. Summary • EGEE considers standards to be paramount • Interoperability (incl. with other Grid infrastructures) • Industry support • EGEE is collaborating with several other Grid related projects on standards and best practices (e.g. Condor, Globus, OMII) • EGEE identifies “gaps” for which no standards exist(e.g. delegation and application interaction with infrastructure components/firewalls) • EGEE is, in particular, tracking progress of WS-* standards and related tooling OMIISC, London