Grids use X.509 certificates for authentication and authorization. These certificates are issued to subscribers that comprise a virtual organization, and are typically issued by Certification Authorities operated by real institutions. In order to ensure compliance with established policies and operational procedures, and to recommend necessary changes in controls, policies or procedures, these Certification Authorities (CAs) should be externally audited periodically. The International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) has, based on templates established by OGF, established such sets of operational policies and procedures. This document provides an audit checklist which describes auditing items to be considered by CAs accredited by the IGTF to be compliant with the ‘Classic’ Authentication Profile, and provides the acceptable evidence for the verification of these items. Detailed processes of auditing are also described in this document which is intended as guidelines for auditing Grid CAs. Spread sheets of the check list for ‘Classic’, ‘Short Lived Credential Services (SLCS)’, and ‘Member Integrated Credential Services (MICS)’ profiles are provided as separate documents and available on the IGTF web site. This document as well as the spread sheets will be maintained and updated when there is a newer version of authentication profiles available than it refers.

This document is a result of the work of OGF RISGE-RG. It presents collection of use cases that covers various existing approaches in defining remote access interfaces to sophisticated laboratory equipment. One of the important aspect covered by these examples is an exploitation of Grid technologies for conducting and monitoring measurement tasks and experiments on complex remote scientific equipment.

This document describes the implementation experiences of independent implementations of WS-Agreement along with an overview of the projects that have implemented WS-Agreement so far. It also presents the features of WS-Agreement used by 8 of the implementations. Finally, the document contains information on set-up and results of an experiment where two independent implementations of WS-Agreement were used to mutually exchange templates describing jobs and create agreements.

This document describes experience in building an INFOD system from the specification document. It also includes changes that should be included in a new version of an INFOD specification.

The NML-WG goal is to define a schema for describing topologies of hybrid networks. This schema is in first instance intended for:
* lightpath provisioning applications to exchange topology information intra and inter domain;
* reporting performance metrics.

This document constitutes Deliverable 1 of the working group. It provides a detailed overview of the framework in which the working group operates, detailing the already existing topology schemas and providing the basis for the integration of the various projects.

Web-based online communities such as blogs, forums and scientific communities have become important places for people to seek and share expertise. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Live etc. are not yet capable to address queries that require deep semantic understanding of the query or the document. Instead, it may be preferable to find and ask someone who has related expertise or experience on a topic. Web-based online communities are the places people often seek advice or help. Before an analysis of search capabilities for these communities can be done, we need to gather the data (questions and answers, social support or discussion, comments or advice, content rating, social relations, and so forth) that describe the communities. There is no universal standard data structure for the outline of user participation in these communities. Also, as these communities rarely interoperate, each typically only has access to its own social data and cannot benefit from other communities’ data. Extracting, aggregating and analyzing data from these communities for finding experts on a single framework is a challenging task. In this document, we present a Grid-enabled framework of expertise search (GREFES) engine, which utilizes online communities as sources for experts on various topics. We suggest an open data structure called SNML (Social Network Markup Language) to outline user participation in online communities. The architecture addresses major challenges in crawling of community data and query processing by utilizing the computational power and high bandwidth inherently available in the Grid. Our framework supports open APIs for third party providers or developers to build new solutions in order to get more user feedback to improve the system.

The Database Access and Integration Services Working Group (DAIS-WG) has submitted three specifications to the Open Grid Forum (OGF) recommendation track [WS-DAI, WS-DAIR, WS-DAIX]. These specifications define a basic set of interfaces, properties and patterns for service-based access to data. The core WS-DAI specification outlines a set of generic interfaces and properties that are common to most types of data access. These may then be extended to access specific types of data. For instance, the WS-DAIR and WS-DAIX specifications extend the base specification to provide access to relational and XML types of data respectively.

This document outlines and motivates a further extension to the WS-DAI family of specifications to provide access to RDF(S) data. This will define a standard mechanism for accessing RDF(S) data in a manner consistent with the framework defined by the WS-DAI core specification. The main outcome of this work will be two specifications that provide complementary ways for accessing RDF(S) data: by using the W3C defined SPARQL query language or through the use of ontological primitives.

This document motivates this work by presenting an overview of the role of RDF(S) in a grid context with several motivational use cases.

This document is an informal description of Use Cases and requirements for the OCCI Cloud API. Created by the Open Cloud Computing Interface working group. This document records the needs of Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud computing managers and administrators in the form of Use Cases. The Use Cases serve as the primary guide for the development of API requirements. The document is the first deliverable to demonstrate and validate the features of the Open Cloud Computing Interface.

This document describes a multi-server based namespace data management system for Resource Namespace Service (RNS), which is introduced in GFD 101. In this system, RNS can be accessed through a master node, which provides the standard interfaces and functions defined in GFD 101. When the master node receives the RNS request, it will dispatch the request to one of the slave nodes based on load balancing policy. Every slave node stores a copy of the namespace data and responses to the read request, such as list and query functions, while only one slave node responses to the write request, such as add, update and remove function. There is a data synchronization process to keep the data consistence on all the slave nodes. In this method, even though one or more slave servers failed, the RNS can also provide stable service. This multi-server based namespace data management system can improve the availability and scalability of RNS.

The Data Access and Integration Services (DAIS) Working Group have defined three proposed recommendations within the Open Grid Forum (OGF). The OGF process and requirements document (GFD.152) states that two independent interoperable implementations are required for a proposed recommendation to become a full OGF recommendation. This OGF experimental document reports on interoperability testing of two implementations of WS-DAIR (GFD.76) – one from the OGSA-DAI group at The University of Edinburgh and the other based on AMGA from KISTI. In addition, as the WS-DAIR proposed recommendation is an extension to WS-DAI (GFD.74), the testing process has encompassed both the WS-DAIR and WS-DAI proposed recommendations. The tests documented in this OGF experimental document establish that it is indeed possible to obtain client-based interoperability for these two implementations. However, as a result of this interoperation process a number of changes are recommended for the WS-DAI and WS-DAIR documents before they gain full recommendation status.

It is important to note that this document establishes a set of interoperability requirements between two or more implementations of the WS-DAI specifications, taking into account the criteria established in GFD.77. This document is not intended to establish a validation process to test the compliance of any particular implementation to any of the (proposed) DAIS recommendations.

The purpose of this document is to specify a protocol for accessing a Policy Decision Point (PDP) by a Grid Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) in order to obtain access control decisions containing obligations. The protocol is a profile of the SAML2.0 profile of XACMLv2 request/response contexts, tailored especially for grid use.

This document presents a specification for an authorization credential retrieval protocol based on the use of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and protocol as a format for requesting and retrieving attribute assertions.

This document provides a protocol for an authorization component to access an external credential validation service (CVS) prior to calling a policy decision point (PDP). The protocol is a profile of a SAML attribute assertion carried by WS-Trust.

This document describes the various components that make up the authorization decision function of a Grid service provider. It looks at the different ways in which the various components can be combined together, and data flows between the components. This document is for informational purposes only and is not intended to form a grid standard.

This is an OGF informational document outlining the need for, and some possible approaches to developing, a Professional Grid Certification Program. It is aimed at the stakeholders who might be interested in developing such a certification programme, including potential employers of certified Grid professionals as well as the certification and training industries and middleware and technology providers.

The document outlines a possible structure of a Certification Program along with some options for how to develop and sustain such an effort. Finally, some possible future directions are outlined in the Future work section.

A few groups have developed independent implementations of the Storage Resource Management (SRM) interface specification v2.2. This document describes those implementations and experiences in interoperability testing. Issues that were identified during the implementations of the specification and the production deplopyments of the implementations in various projects help develop more robust specification in the next version.

This document is a call to action, identifying issues and proposing a strategy in order to support and make progress in grid and e-Science education and training. Inevitably, it is neither complete nor definitive. The intention is that it will seed much greater efforts to further develop the understanding of requirements, to better characterise challenges and to propose specific strategies, curricula and collaborative efforts for international adoption. The ET-CG is already fostering other more specific work and documents that form elements of that development.

This document defines the types of OGF documents and the development and review processes for each type. This document obsoletes GFD.1 and replaces it as the description of OGF community practice surrounding the document series. The process reflects several years of experience with OGF document publication, and borrows heavily from the Internet Engineering Task Force Request for Comments document process.

This document defines the Advanced Filter extension – an alternative to the Basic Filter element described in the HPC Basic Profile 1.0 specification. The Basic Filter provides only an ‘on’ or ‘off’ approach to returning information about the activities or resources operating within the Basic Execution Service container. The Advanced Filter extension provides more flexibility to the client in returning information from an HPC Basic Profile complaint endpoint.

Grids in their current form of deployment and implementation have not been as successful as hoped in engendering distributed applications. Amongst other reasons, the level of detail that needs to be controlled for the successful development and deployment of applications remains too high. We argue that there is a need for higher levels of abstractions for current Grids. By introducing the relevant terminology, we try to understand Grids and Clouds as systems; we nd this leads to a natural role for the concept of Anity, and argue that this is a missing element in current Grids. Providing these anities and higher-level abstractions is consistent with the common concepts of Clouds. Thus this paper establishes how Clouds can be viewed as a logical and next higher-level abstraction from Grids.

This document specifies the syntax and semantics of the proposed Parameter Sweep extension to the Job Submission Description Language (JSDL) 1.0 [JSDL]. The syntax and semantics defined in this document provide an alternative to explicitly submitting thousands of individual JSDL job submissions of the same base job template, except with a different set of parameters for each.

This document describes the experiences of interoperability testing of independent implementations of the OGSA WSRF Basic Profile 1.0, and the specifications that it incorporates by reference, namely Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core, Web Services Resource Properties 1.2, Web Services Resource Lifetime 1.2, Web Service Base Faults 1.2, and Web Services Base Notification 1.3.

Many problems were encountered during the tests, largely related to schema errors, platform/tooling incapability, and specification issues. Despite this the tests proved in so much as they identified two issues in the OGSA WSRF Basic Profile and the WS-BaseNotifiation specifications. Solutions were proposed and were agreed by all implementers and original Profile authors.

The GLUE specification is an information model for Grid entities described using the natural language and UML Class Diagrams. As a conceptual model, it is designed to be independent from the concrete data models adopted for its implementation. Rendering to concrete data models such XML Schema, LDAP Schema and SQL are provided in a separate document.

This document reports about experiences made with running OGSA ByteIO working group interoperability test scenarios based on the ByteIO OGSA® WSRF Basic Profile Rendering 1.0 of the ByteIO Specification 1.0 as implemented by the four groups participating in the OGSA ByteIO Interoperability Fiesta. The four groups represented different implementation environments: Genesis II by the University of Virginia (UVa), UNICORE by Forschungszentrum Jülich, OGSA-DAI by EPCC, the University of Edinburgh (EPCC), and a clean-room implementation by Fujitsu Labs of Europe (FLE).

This document also remarks on the special considerations made to implement the OGSA ByteIO specifications on different Web Services and XML stacks. The main difficulties arise because of the way that different Web Services and XML tooling interprets particular elements. These arose not in the implementation of the ByteIO specification itself, but in the associated implementation required for the interoperability experiments.

This document describes the requirements for construction and operation of grid systems. This document does not say “Grid Systems must satisfy these requirements”. It says “These requirements shall be considered when someone designs / constructs / operates on Grid Systems”

This document species a Service Discovery API extension to the Simple API
for Grid Applications (SAGA), a high level, application-oriented API for grid
application development. This Service Discovery API is motivated by a number
of Use Cases collected by the OGF SAGA Research Group in GFD.70 [4], and
by requirements derived from these Use Cases, as specied in GFD.71 [5]). It
allows users to nd services with minimal prior knowledge of the grid or grids
they plan to use.

This document describes the representation of the DRMAA 1.0 API in the Python programming language. It is based on the DRMAA 1.0 IDL recommendation (GFD-R-P.130), and maps the DRMAA IDL interface definition to specific Python language constructs.

This document describes and evaluates approaches and solutions for firewall issues, such as application level gateways, host based firewalls, VPN style gateways etc., which are currently available to solve some of the problems Grid applications may face when dealing with firewalls located between the source and the destination of their communication paths.

This document shows how specifications, that have been developed within and external to the Open Grid Forum, can be used to enable desktop access to distributed computing resources. Increasingly, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are developing applications that have two components – a graphical client that resides on the client and a compute intensive server compo-nent that can run on a ‘back-end’ compute cluster. Integrating these two components within net-works which frequently have firewalls and NATs, across different operating systems and software environments, provides many challenges. A standards based interface to this environment would provide ISVs with a solid foundation upon which to build their own applications.

We identify and describe a set of standards and specification that have been developed to facili-tate access to distributed computing resources. We illustrate how these specifications could en-able access to distributed computing resources through five scenarios. These range from simple job submission to a compute cluster where the client and the cluster have a common file system, to a client that stages files to and from the compute cluster while having bi-directional interaction between the application running on the compute cluster and the remote client.

By illustrating how these specifications can be applied to these scenarios we identify require-ments for both the middleware providers and the ISVs – recognizing that we are providing advice rather than rigid prescriptive solutions. Finally, we identify some open issues for discussion and feedback by the community relating to resource selection and security.

This document describes the implementation and interoperability experiences of independent implementations of the Job Submission Description Language (JSDL) 1.0.

On February 28, 2008, as part of OGF22, the Open Grid Forum held Data Movement and Management Workshop. During the day-long meeting, speakers from research and industry described challenges in data movement and management and detailed some possible solutions. The goal was to look for common issues and points for collaboration among the OGF working group and with the Storage Networking Industry Association. The common theme that emerged was the challenge of metadata management. Both research centers and commercial enterprises are flooded with data and are struggling to provide useful access.

An OGSA basic profile is a profile in the style of WS-Interoperability (WS I) that defines recommended usage of infrastructure-level standards for Grid scenarios. OGSA services are expected to use one such profile for each infrastructure capability needed. This document defines such a basic profile for security by bringing together two general, non-OGSA specific, profiles on secure addressing and secure communication.
This profile can be composed with other basic profiles. In particular this profile satisfies the security requirements of the WSRF Basic Profile 1.0 and can be composed with it.

Resources in a grid need to advertise their capabilities, and activities in a grid need to consume those resources. This architecture paper defines the way to model resources’ capabilities and requirements in OGSA grids. It builds on the wealth of existing systems management information already modeled and instantiated in systems today. Examples are included.

This document specifies the semantics and structure of the Job Submission Description Lan-guage (JSDL). JSDL is used to describe the requirements of computational jobs for submission to resources, particularly in Grid environments, though not restricted to the latter. The document includes the normative XML Schema for the JSDL, along with examples of JSDL documents based on this schema.

This document profiles the File staging capabilities of the Job Submission Description Language (JSDL) for use by HPC Basic Profile-compliance services. It includes clarifications, refinements, interpretations and amplifications of JSDL which promote interoperability.

This document describes the experience of interoperability testing of independent implementa-tions of the High Performance Computing Basic Profile (HPCBP) and the specifications which it profiles, the Basic Execution Service (BES) and the Job Submission Description Language (JSDL).

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) has embraced the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) as the blueprint for standards-based grid computing. "Open" refers to the process used to develop standards that achieve interoperability. "Grid" is concerned with the integration, virtualization, and management of services and resources in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. It is "service-oriented" because it delivers functionality as loosely coupled, interacting services aligned with industry-accepted Web service standards. The “architecture” defines the components, their organizations and interactions, and the design philosophy used.

The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the many interrelated recommendations and informational documents being produced by the OGSA and related working groups. Although, some documents are not OGSA specific, for example the "reference model," they have an important role within the OGSA concept and hence are explained in this document. This document also provides information regarding the intended completion dates of the documents in question, along with their dependencies on other OGSA and non-OGSA documents.

This document defines the HPC Basic Profile, consisting of a set of non-proprietary specifications, along with clarifications, refinements, interpretations and amplifications of those specifications which promote interoperability.

This document specifies the semantics and structure of the HPC Profile Application. The HPC Profile Application is an extension to JSDL 1.0 [JSDL10] that is used to describe an executable running as an operating system process. The document includes the normative XML Schema for the HPC Profile Application, along with examples of documents based on this schema.

This document presents a specification for a Basic Execution Service (BES): a service to which clients can send requests to initiate, monitor, and manage computational activities. The specification defines an extensible state model for activities; an extensible information model for a BES and the activities that it creates; and two port-types; BES-Management and BES-Factory. BES-Management defines operations for managing the BES itself. BES-Factory defines operations for initiating, monitoring, and managing sets of activities, and for accessing information about the BES. An optional unspecified BES-Activity port-type indicates an extension point for operations relating to the monitoring and management of individual activities.