- From: Vincent Quint <Vincent.Quint@inrialpes.fr>
- Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 10:42:32 +0200
- To: Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>
- Cc: Vincent.Quint@inrialpes.fr, www-tag@w3.org
Just minor detail: my name is listed twice under "Present".
For the rest, these minutes give an excellent summary of
our discussion with Paul.
Thanks, Norm.
Vincent.
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:43:38 -0400 Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM> wrote:
>
> 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.
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----------
Vincent Quint INRIA Rhône-Alpes
INRIA ZIRST
e-mail: Vincent.Quint@inria.fr 655 avenue de l'Europe
Tel.: +33 4 76 61 53 62 Montbonnot
Fax: +33 4 76 61 52 07 38334 Saint Ismier Cedex
France
Received on Wednesday, 14 September 2005 08:42:44 UTC