GGF-17 Applications Area Workshop
(Tokyo, Japan)

"Bridging the Divide:
 Community Application Requirements Driving Standards Development"

Session 1: "Current Status - Development of Standard APIs"
Chair: Steven Newhouse

Thursday, May 11, 2006, 09:00-10:30 G409

* Welcome, Motivation & Goals (Steven Newhouse) [10 min]

* DRMAA - Distributed Resource Mgnt App API (Andre Merzky) [20 min]
  https://forge.gridforum.org/projects/drmaa-wg
  - No DRMAA meeting at GGF, thus:
    Andre Merzky reports on behalf of Peter Troeger
  - Status of DRMAA
  - Characteristics of DRMAA functionality:
    - function groups, job templates, job monitoring, ...
    - job state diagram
  - DRMAA in practice
  - Next steps: final document + experience reports
  - Q&A:
    - Comparison of DRMAA to SAGA job submission

* GridRPC - Grid Remote Procedure Call (Hidemoto Nakada) [20 min]
  https://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gridrpc-wg
  - Status of GridRPC and usage
  - Comparison with MPI, job scheduler scripts
  - Application configurations
  - Implementations (Ninf-G, GridSolve, Diet)
  - Q&A:
    - Interaction with Globus
    - Lifetime of executables (when does it finish?)

* SAGA - Simple API for Grid Applications (Thilo Kielmann) [20 min]
  https://forge.gridforum.org/projects/saga-rg
  - Functional & non-functional properties of a Grid API
  - Foremost goal of SAGA - Simple (rather than complete)
  - Platform independence through dynamically loaded proxies
  - Functionality in SAGA/Examples
  - Q&A:
    - Uptake by vendors? Is it important? Where are we?
    - Are de-facto standards good enough?
    - Uniformity across heterogenous platforms

* Discussion [20 min]

Session 2: "Consuming Standards - Current Uses and Future Requirements"
Chair: Dieter Kranzlmüller

Thursday, May 11, 2006, 11:00-12:30 G409

* Summary of Session 1 and Intro to Session 2 (Dieter Kranzlmüller) [10 min]
- see slides

* Astronomical Grid Community (Reagan Moore) [20 min]
  - Grid challenges for applications
  - Application characteristics of astronomical community
  - Fundamental grid operations?
  - Which services should be viewed as fundamental to be provided by the 
WGs?
  - Missing ingredients

* NAREGI - National Research Grid Initiative (Mutsumi Aoyagi) [20 min]
  - Overview of NAREGI - Workpackages, Software Stack, Highlights
  - Example: Workflow tool and super scheduler
  - Request: standardization of job scheduling language
  - Application mediator: grid middleware for coupled simulations
  - Standardization is sometimes a complicated process - people are needed 
at the interface
  - Q&A:
    - Standardisation not at application layer?

* Grid Application Integration (Chris Smith) [20 min]
  - Application integration in pictures
  - The overlap with SAGA
  - Some possible future SAGA direction
  - Task-oriented application architecture
  - Separating the application API from the resource management API
  - Q&A:
    - Backends for the proposed API
    - Master-worker approach

* Discussion [20 min]

Session Summary:

This workshop will provide a showcase of standards and community activity
within GGF by bringing together groups in three different areas (Standards
Applications, Community Industry Applications & Community Research
Applications). Through a series of presentations we will show the current
state of the standards activity and critically the current barriers to
pervasive adoption as perceived by the consuming user community. Finally, a
panel session will help to define areas of collaboration and potentially new
areas for standards development.

Session Description:

GGF has an active standards and community areas focusing on engagement with
application developers and tool builders in research and industry. For these
separate areas to work effectively we need to build a relationship where the
APIs being developed within the standards area are relevant to the research
and industry consumers, and in turn the application and tool builders are
communicating to the standards area their requirements in terms of stable
defined interfaces.

With the greater emphasis on GGF's redefined standards and community
functions, and the factorization of the standards area into having an
'umbrella' research group to drive the coordinated development of a set of
consistent APIs across several working groups, there is a need to establish
the communication links between the standards and community areas for
Applications.

This workshop, hopefully the first of many, will start to establish the
communication links and provide a showcase as to the current state of the
standards development and the current priorities for application and tool
development in industry and research. In addition, it will provide a general
dissemination mechanism of activity to developers and users (both critical
consumers in terms of achieving pervasive grid adoption) and the wider GGF
community as to activity in the standards and community areas.

Session Leaders:
Dieter Kranzlmueller, Steven Newhouse, Thilo Kielmann, Craig Lee