- From: Rice, Ed (HP.com) <ed.rice@hp.com>
- Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:12:37 -0700
- To: "Norman Walsh" <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>, <www-tag@w3.org>
Norm,
I think we asked to remove the 'Draft' at the top as long as we're
communicating in the emails that it's a Draft document.
Also Dan's comment;
<DanC> (btw, norm, re partitioning your ubuntu box, I highly
recommend LVM)
I don't believe was intended for the minutes as it may be a product
endorsement :)
-Ed
-----Original Message-----
From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Norman Walsh
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2005 11:44 AM
To: www-tag@w3.org
Cc: Paul Strong
Subject: Draft minutes of TAG telcon 13 Sep 2005
Draft minutes published:
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2005/09/13-minutes.html
- DRAFT -
W3C TAG telcon
13 Sep 2005
Agenda
See also: IRC log
Attendees
Present
PaulStrong, Vincent, Norm, Ed, Vincent, DanC, DOrchard
Regrets
TimBL, HT, NM, Roy
Chair
Vincent
Scribe
Norm
Contents
* Topics
1. Administrivia
2. Discussion of GRID
3. Edinburgh Face-to-Face
* Summary of Action Items
----------------------------------------------------------------------
<scribe> Scribe: Norm
<scribe> ScribeNick: Norm
Administrivia
Most of today is for GRID discussions
Accept minutes of last telcon:
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2005/09/06-minutes.html
Accepted (Vincent will remove "DRAFT").
Discussion of GRID
Thanks to Paul Strong for joining us
This is an informal discussion of GRID and it's connection to the Web
Paul: Paul Strong is a Systems Architect at Sun. Works in the N1
product
group. N1 is a suite of products that leverage the GRID
... Grid is a somewhat ambiguous term being widely used by vendors
... Within N1, I've been working on products for about five years.
Mostly
working on data center and enterprise applications
... Recommends July issue of ACM Queue
... GRID is a view of the networking infrastructure
... It's a view of computing resources that are pervasive. It's more
about
the platform than the end-user applications
<DanC> (hm... http://www.sun.com/software/gridware/index.xml Sun N1
Grid
Engine 6 ... seems to be a hunk of hardware. I thought maybe N1 was a
service.)
Paul: GRID really is about recognizing two trends: growth in network
bandwidth, and network distributed services
... GRID platform offers scalability, redundancy, ...
... Needs services for distributing and managing work loads
... Analogous to an electrical grid, in the sense that it's pervasive
and
more-or-less uniform
<DanC> (hmm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing "The
SETI@home
project, launched in 1999, is a widely-known example of a simple grid
computing project." )
DanC: Sun N1 Grid seems to be a hunk of hardware...
Paul: The N1 products are a mixture of both hardware and services
... Software is a meta-operating environment. Those products are
called N1
... They're closely tied to a set of hardware to run them on at Sun.
The
result is an integrated set of components. You no longer care about
individual servers or OS instances.
DanC: So if I buy a chunk of N1, do I get CPU hours or a box?
Paul: It depends what you want, you can buy time on our GRID, or buy
hardware and setup your own
... An example of a GRID application is SETI@Home
... The use of the term GRID was prevalent initially in scientific
and
academic community.
... In the commercial space, rendering and simulation applications
... The software that allows that workload to be
distributed/managed/aggregated is the middleware, integration layer
that
is the meta-operating environment
DanC: Is it a style of computing, or is it technical standards that
you
could interoperate with?
Paul: It's some of both
DanC: Does SETI@Home conform?
Paul: No, it predates them. The context is still being refined.
... There are a couple of consortia working on this: The Global Grid
Forum
... There's The Enterprise GRID Alliance, focused on driving GRID
adoption
within enterprises
<DanC> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing doesn't seem to
mention The Enterprise GRID Alliance )
Paul: To get the GRID used in less compute-intensive environments
<DanC> Enterprise GRID Alliance
Paul: discusses benefits of GRID: ability to manage pools of
resources; a
mutable, dynamic space
... reiterates the goal of treating these things holisticly...
<DanC> (EJB and J2... missed. hmm... I was starting to understand...)
Paul: workload management, mechanisms for monitoring, managing,
controlling processes
... Users need to be able to combine a heterogeneous set of products
and
services together
... Standards are needed to allow each of these components to be
managed.
... The term GRID has become very loaded.
[scribe lost thread]
There's lots of marketing in this space: managing complexity,
providing
agility, etc.
Paul: They're very similar, but they aren't identical. The GRID space
is
very confusing for many of the end-users and consumers.
Ed: GRID is a very broad term. Everything from SETI@Home to shared
system
resource pools that's more of a realtime virtual machine type of
thing
Paul: Yes, absolutely.
... One of the difficulties we have as an industry is articulating
this
... It's going to take a long time to get to the end.
... A lot of the technologies we think about today in the GRID space
that
do the mapping of workload onto resources
... There are also provisioning services
... What we're automating today is the provisioning processes, but
that's
just the beginning.
DanC: How is provisioning expensive?
Paul: Consider an electronic book store that has a web tier, a web
service
tier(?), and a database server tier
... There's a set of database servers running on particular Sun
hardware
with a particular OS
... The services layer might be BEA running on some particular Dell
hardware
... Right now there isn't a standardized way to describe all these
components
... Not only are the components complex, but there's a relationship
with
every other component already in the data center
... Today, people manage individual resources
... But those are increasing exponentially
... Because they don't trust management tools, each server is
typically
dedicated to a single function
... This leads to silos of services that perform single tasks
... This leads to waste and lack of agility
... It's very hard to track relationships between all the components
DanC: Are there any GRID computing saves the day stories?
Paul: There are stories that it's leading that way
... A lot of stuff is relatively static today. We have a tool that
allows
you to provision complete projects, like the bookstore
... It does all the work
... It typically pays for itself in six to twelve months. There are
fewer
unplanned outages because planned downtime is all automated
... It's more deterministic in production and is more reliable.
... The developers can create the model when they create the
application.
For provisioning the test and QA engineers can test with a single
button.
DanC: It has a little blinking light that says "you need a new
database
server"
Paul: Yep.
[Scribe hears something about ad hoc construction that seems at odds
with
the previous story..]
Paul: When load gets high, the provisioning application will attempt
to
reconfigure (scribe ?)
... Getting to the point where it all "just works" is going to take a
long
time. It's very easy to solve problems with regards to concrete
things,
but it's far more complicated when you're trying to model more
abstract
components (a server vs. a tier of servers)
DanC: It's all proprietary things cobbled together, but Sun does have
products in this space?
Paul: Yes. It's mapping workload onto resources with respect to
policy.
<Ed> HP and IBM do as well. Unfortunately, they don't work together
to
create one grid, each has its own grid.
Paul: In the GRID world, we're talking about mapping services (a
bookstore, SETI@home, etc.) onto a network of resources (servers,
firewalls, etc.) with respect to policies
<DanC> (btw, norm, re partitioning your ubuntu box, I highly
recommend
LVM)
Paul: The first things that get automated are the simple mechanisms.
... There will eventually be a move towards automating higher order
problems, such as managing performance and availability.
... Today there are no single products that let you do all of those
things
... Instead you get different products to manage different aspects of
that. You get something that is more automated, but still has lots of
human interaction
... Sun has products that fit into a number of those spaces, but none
are
integrated together as a whole meta-operating system. No one's
products
are.
Vincent: What are the consortia doing today, what are the main
standards
under development?
Paul: Several things are needed
... A way of describing the requirements of the system
The Enterprise Grid Alliance is working on this sort of thing
Paul: And use cases based on that description
... We're working on a standard set of requirements that we can give
to
other standards organizations
... The Global Grid Forum is working on standards farther downstream
... A service-centric architectural view; the OGSA (Open Grid
Services
Architecture)
... Because GRID was originally driven by compute-intensive
applications,
they have a lot of those, but they're working on getting more broad
... A job control language is one example. How do I describe a work
load,
schedule it, monitor it, etc.
... As you approach the more concrete things, you want to standardize
them
too. That's where interaction with DMTF occurs.
DMTF = Distributed Management Task Force (www.dmtf.org)
They own the SIM standard (Standard Information Model)
There's work to make some of these things more abstract as well
(pools of
servers instead of single servers)
Paul: There are OASIS GRID/WS standards under development as well
... You can look at GRID as the platform that is the network that is
the
web
... There are other standards in this space too (for storage, for
example)
<Zakim> DanC, you wanted to ask if these enterprise grids have peers
grids
DanC: Are enterprise grids mostly their own world, or do they have
peers?
... Does my grid talk to other grids?
Paul: We define an enterprise grid as the set of components (from
disks to
CRM applications) managed by a single enterprise
... But each may have several data centers
... In some sense, they're isolated in terms of management, but they
do
interact with the Web.
... And one enterprise grid could interact with another (the
bookstore
grid interacting with the credit card company grid)
DanC: How will these two talk to each other?
Paul: The expectation is that we'd be using standard mechanisms for
interaction
... But I as the bookstore owner may have expectations about the
speed of
service from the credit card company
... I may want to negotiate that quality of service.
... Possibly on a per-transaction basis.
If my customer is a real brick-and-mortar store ordering thousands of
books, I may want a faster answer than for Joe Individual User.
Paul: We chose to bound the problem at a single enterprise because it
makes authority and control simpler
... When you're working across enterprises, then you have federation
rather than hierarchy
... GGF views its charter as everything grid, they see what EGA does
as
(an important) subset
... They care about viewing the internet as a set of computers
controlled
by different organizations but on which I could impose a virtual
organization
... For example, automobile design is sometimes shared across
companies
because it's so expensive
... From the GGF perspective, a virtual GRID could be constructed
between
these companies
... Typically, the shared resources are segregated from the companies
own
resources
Ed: It seems like because the GRID is undefined, a lot of work is
hindered. If it's more along the lines of a distributed computing
environment, then I can see where that comes into play. Is there
progress
on defining either striations or a clear definition of what GRID is?
Paul: In terms of the word GRID, no
... We're working on this to some sense in EGA by working on
requirements.
By being able to clearly enumerate and describe problems, we can
guide GGF
to work on a particular area.
... A big challenge is identifying the set of problems that people
care
about most and the boundary between the components we care about.
Paul describes a number of things that can be virtualized
Paul: Having a model for these components and the life cycle of those
components is critical for the standards bodies to be able to do
stuff
that isn't unintentionally competitive
Ed: Right, and I guess that's why I think breaking the big problem
down
into smaller problems seems like something you'd want to do
Paul: GGF is more of a boil the ocean perspective, EGA is about
boiling
enough water to make a cup of tea
... There is a working group called the SCRUM (scribe wonders about
spelling) in GGF that's trying to look at these issues
<Zakim> DanC, you wanted to ask about job migration between, say,
sun's
and IBM's grid services
DanC: If Amazon rented time on the Sun N1 thingy and some IBM On
Demand
computing, is it feasible to migrate jobs across those?
Paul: It totally depends.
... There are certain classes of workflow where you can migrate the
work
today. In a batchable system, you could move them around in stages.
... Rendering would be a good example. I've got 20,000 jobs, I can
send
10,000 to each. 3,000 fail on one system so I can migrate them to the
other.
... If you have shared infrastructure, you can migrate between
transactions
DanC: Across the Sun/IBM boundary?
Paul: Technically, yes.
... Right now a lot of this is really proprietary. It'll become
easier
after the standards are written.
... People are mainly looking at whole data centers or whole
enterprises
at the moment.
Vincent: Is there anything important that you feel wasn't addressed?
Paul: I'm not really sure.
Paul recommends ACM Queue Magazine again
Most of the articles will be online soon.
http://www.acmqueue.org/
TAG thanks Paul for a great overview.
Vincent: Thanks also to Norm for organizing Sun's participation
Norm: Thanks again, Paul
Edinburgh Face-to-Face
Draft agenda: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2005/09/20-agenda.html
Vincent: Some time for issue status, then time for four or five
issues to
discuss.
... Return to the discussion of new directions.
<Zakim> DanC, you wanted to ask for abstractComponentRefs-37 on the
ftf
agenda, maybe
DanC feels more prepared to talk about abstractComponentRefs-37
Vincent: Try to review the draft agenda over the next day or so and
send
feedback so it can be updated before the f2f.
... Any other business?
Next meeting is the f2f on 20 Sep in Edinburgh
Adjourned
Summary of Action Items
[End of minutes]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Minutes formatted by David Booth's scribe.perl version 1.127 (CVS
log)
$Date: 2005/09/13 18:39:31 $
Be seeing you,
norm
--
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended
recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information.
Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited.
If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by
reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.
Received on Tuesday, 13 September 2005 21:13:10 UTC