Grids - the near future

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Grids - the near future

• Mark Hayes

NIEeS Summer School 2003
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Web services

• A web service is a network-accessible application
• identified by a URI
• e.g. http//terraservice.net/TerraService.asmx
  ?opGetTile
• with an interface defined in terms of XML based
  messages
• these messages transported by internet
  protocols (usually HTTP)
• The application its interface definition
  should be
• discoverable by other applications
• independent of OS platform programming
  language.
• W3C standards body http//www.w3c.org/

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Acronym soup
XML - eXtensible Markup Language XSLT -
eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations SOA
P - Simple Object Access Protocol WSDL- Web
Service Description Language UDDI - Universal
Description, Discovery Integration
protocol BPEL - Business Process Execution
Language WSIF - Web Services Invocation
Framework ..
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terraservice.net
Web service interface to http//terraserver.micro
soft.com/ Example app US Department
of Agriculture have a database of soil
properties, federated with terraservice.net to
provide geographical topographic detail.
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Grid services
An extension of web services to provide for the
dynamic creation (and destruction) of service
instances. Why is this useful? Consider
submitting a job OGSA Open Grid Services
Architecture builds on... OGSI Open Grid
Services Infrastructure GGF standards body
http//www.gridforum.org/ OGSI specification now
in GGF comments period. The community develops
OGSA services.
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Database Access Integration
OGSA services for federation of XML relational
databases. http//www.ogsadai.org.uk/
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Globus Toolkit v3
A re-implementation based on OGSI, though many
services are wrappers around GT2
implementation. Production release just out
June 30th. Intended backwards compatibility with
GT2.
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The UK Grid in the next year
GT2 based Grid will continue for at least the
next year. In parallel, GT3 evaluation
experimental Grid On-going efforts to produce
documentation, improve resource management
accounting, a user group
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UK eScience - future plans
Digital curation centre - software development,
best practices Open Middleware Institute -
repository software engineering of UK grown
middleware More applications!