GIN Overview Circa December 2006

Grid Interoperation Now (GIN) has four active technical "sub-groups" and an application sub-group focused on driving and verifying interoperation strategies.

The GIN group chairs are Erwin Laure (CERN), Stuart Martin (UC/ANL), and Phil Papadopolous (UCSD). The chairs work as a team with Steven Newhouse (OMII), Stephen Pickles (Manchester), Satoshi Matsuoka (TIT), Charlie Catlett (UC/ANL), Dane Skow (UC/ANL), and Peter Arzberger (UCSD) to oversee the four GIN subgoups.

Key activities/progress

After an introductory workshop, planned by representatives from nine grid projects, in February 2006 we have formed sub-groups as outlined below and have expanded to roughly 20 grid projects actively involved and/or tracking progress.

Information Services - led by Laura Perlman (ISI) and Satoshi Matsuoka (TIT). This group has been identifying a subset of information items that can be used as a common minimum set, and has been working on translation of these to and between GLUE and CIM.

Job Submission - led by Steven Newhouse. This group has been identifying commonly used job submission mechanisms with the goal of identifying a common mechanism, in some cases involving a translation between the native job submission scheme of a grid facility and the common mechanism. They have identified Globus GRAM and JSDL, with potential for BES in the longer term.

Data Movement - led by Erwin Laure. This group is focusing on interoperation within two "islands" of technology, with parallel efforts in the SRM and SRB communities. In addition, the groups are working together to finalize an SRM interface to SRB, allowing for interoperation. Interoperation of GridFTP has also been exercised and documented.

Authorization and Identity Management - led by Dane Skow. This group is developing policy and experimenting with cross-domain authorization using VOMS technology.

Applications - led by Cindy Zheng (Pragma). This group has used one application to help the technical sub-groups to verify interoperation. Based on this experience additional applications will be added (see next steps).

Next steps with approximate time scale

The GIN areas have reached the point (since initiating work in February 2006) where additional applications are required to validate the technical approaches and help to identify needs and opportunities for improved interoperation.

In May 2006, after initial application testing, the group began to structure interoperation work through a set of matrices showing interoperation by grid project. For example, showing GridFTP connectivity and performance between participating Grid facilities.

In September 2006 we determined that each participating grid project in the leadership team (6 or 8 of them) would identify 1 or 2 applications for exercising and demonstrating the interoperation at SC06. This would give us more applications to work with and more insight into how things work under various conditions.

Based on the 2006 activities and applications experience we will hold another planning workshop after SC06 to determine next steps for GIN in 2007.