Service Grids: Current Activity & Middleware Requirements 22 July, 04 10:00 AM - 23 July, 04 04:00 PM e-Science Institute, 15 South College Street, , Edinburgh Organiser: Malcolm Atkinson (National e-Science Centre), Steven Newhouse (London e-Science Centre),Savas Parastatidis (Newcastle e-Science Centre), David Berry (National e-Science Centre)
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Any slides or other material generated as a result of this event can be found at: www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=415

Motivation

The Grid community has experienced considerable change in the last three years during which time it has evolved from using bespoke protocols within the Globus Toolkit (GT) 2 and other Grid frameworks to the Web Service based framework of the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) and more recently WS-Resource Framework (WS-RF). This activity has taken place alongside growing interest in peer-to-peer, the use of established web service specifications, and other distributed computing infrastructures. Consequently, there is a growing consensus on a service based architecture and the functionality that needs to be provided by these services to support e-Science.

This activity has illustrated the different levels of support and modes of operation provided by the various middleware architectures - the 'plumbing' - and their influence on the design and development of the services. There are two orthogonal aspects that need to be considered from this initial pioneering work in building Grids: what functionality and behaviour are needed within our service-based grids to support e-Science, and what infrastructure best supports the construction and operation of these services?

Workshop Goals

The primary goal of the workshop is to improve our understanding of the requirements, the common services and the effective implementation of service-oriented grid facilities.

That goal will be met by addressing the following subgoals:

• Survey the current activity in delivering Grid capabilities within Service Oriented Architectures.
• Examine the services required to support applied e-Science projects.
• Identify commonalities between different service interfaces and their schemas.
• Compare & contrast current services with those proposed within OGSA-WG
• Examine the user-level API's needed to interact with the core services (to inform SAGA-WG)

The outcome, and in many cases the background justifying that outcome, will be recorded in a report that will be made available as soon as possible after the event. This report should identify and share understanding of effective strategies for implementation and operation of service-oriented grid facilities.

Programme

This workshop will build on a meeting that took place in May 2003 (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2003-02.pdf) which looked at current activity within the UK in building services from the GT3 infrastructure. To ensure an effective working atmosphere that allows for a maximum interchange of ideas the number of participants will be limited to around 25. In order to capture all of the information relating to the different services and their characteristics we are asking all participants to complete a service proforma that will form the basis of their main presentation. If at all possible please complete a proforma and submit it before the start of the workshop. You may submit your proforma along with your application or at a later date via the submission form. Completion of the proforma before the 17th May will allow presentations relating to services with similar functionality (e.g. job submission) to be grouped into 'service sets'. It is hoped that these service sets will be used to define a common interface that can be supported within the UK and by a wider community. If we don't receive them before the workshop, we *will* ask you to complete a proforma during the workshop, so that we have a complete set of data in the report.

Received Proforma

Registration for this event is now closed. To enquire about an application or to cancel a previous application please contact NeSC Administration.

Enquiries

Enquiries should be made directly to our Conference Administrator.

Travel: The e-Science Institute is less than 15 minutes walk from Waverley rail station, and from St Andrews square bus stations. It is approximately 20 minutes by taxi from Edinburgh airport (40 minutes by bus). Please see our web site for a map of the area.

http://www.nesc.ac.uk

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