Moderator: Edward Seidel, Director, Center for Computation & Technology, Louisiana State University

Transcription

1 Ask A Grid Expert Panel & Interaction Thursday January 6, 2005, 4:00-5:30PM Moderator: Edward Seidel, Director, Center for Computation & Technology, Louisiana State University Panelists: Gabrielle Allen, Associate Professor & Asst. Director, CCT, Louisiana State University Jay Boisseau, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), UT Austin Brian Bonenfant, Business Development Manager, SGI Dr. Martin Maldonado, Sr. Technical Architect, Grid Computing, Universities & Research, IBM Rick Schlichting, Director, Software Systems Research, AT&T Labs Heinz Joerg Schwarz, Senior Program Manager, External Research Office, Sun Microsystems Jikku Venkat, CTO, United Devices Introduction. (Each panelist spoke a few words about their Grid background) Involved with early portal, NPACI Hotpage; TACC Project Lead for TeraGrid. Working on middleware resources, research and development with higher education focus. General interest in information grids, security, resource scheduling systems management/networking/valuation and economic models (ROIs for business.) ATT labs since early 1990s. Work on enterprise issues, fault tolerance, optiputer collaboration, protocols. Network is key part of grid. ATT as a world networking company, a service provider for utility computing and next generation distributed computing. Bonenfant: Provides SGI university relations. SGI provides grid infrastructure, visualization, shred file systems. Interested in funding technology software partners to leverage equipment cf. European virtual lab and remote instrument control. With dual assignment Sun Microsystems Lab: future computing technology and technical computing at SUN; also JINI, webservices. CTO and founder of United Devices, in Austin Texas for 5 years. Providing grid solutions, middleware, and service offerings. Pharmaceutical companies use UD, as well as higher ed (UF, TACC, Purdue, UGA ). With IBM, UD has deployed a World Community Grid. The vision: a cloud of infrastructure. Businesses are about dollars and looking for killer applications for grid. Allen: With Center for Computation & Technology, LSU, and Computer Science Faculty LSU; Principle Investigator for Europe s GridLab. Working on development of Grid Application Toolkit and interested in how to take an application and map it to the grid. Panel Discussion: What are commonalities/differences between academic, higher education research and commercial? Industry is looking for solutions to business problems, cost effective solutions irrespective of Grid. Not a set of tools per se, but a solution. Are businesses looking for help with grid, or help with problem (consulting?)? United Devices experience is we come in, do assessment, provide Return on Investment evaluation. In business/commercial environment, is Grid equal to Globus or? No. Globus is not equal to grid. <panelxscript6jan2005.doc> 1

2 As for Research (rather than academic, administrative computing), similar problems of higher education can be taken as with business (cf. TACC needs for effective computing solution). As for differences [between commercial, higher ed research], business customers want ROI solution. IBM s financial model service: analysis with ROI focus implementation can be open [source], commercial, etc. There s a virtual organization (VO) aspect in higher education research and academia; commercial grids tend to be one department, entity. Hence Globus (VO focus) maybe is not so commercially interesting. Is that Globus VO focus a Sun relic? No. While Sun Grid Engine is open source, many customers tend to be engineering shops (don t think financial applications allow grid data sampling!) Bonenfant: Bonenfant: than business? Well, lots of commercial applications are very broad and maybe more varied than academia What about SAS or Matlab that do cluster? Is Grid bad in academia? Is grid a selling point in commercial environment? Yes, in commercial environment. Seems maybe too much hype Heterogeneity was brought up; why is Total Cost of Ownership (ROI) different in higher education Hmmm higher education would seem open to research [with less concern with immediate ROI ] Bonenfant: Maybe it s a terminology thing. Actually, Grid in SAS, Matlab actually is more a serial to parallel movement. SAS, Matlab essentially enabling users to write parallel code with a tool kit. Though academia is trying to run as a business to exist Still, justification is needed (cf. U. Arizona) for academia maybe the metrics are different. Yes. But metrics still are important. Still management, support cost of maintenance remain in academia as constraints Indeed, same issues (cost of maintaining), but the overall economic equation is different. Right. In commercial world, dollar in equates to dollar out. In academia, how to measure research result, publication, or student learning? If Grid is losing tangibility (and calling a grid what is maybe a cluster or standard distributed job), then what is the Grid [if heterogeneity not being the distinguishing point ]? Depends on the school. For instance, at TACC the Computer Science department doesn t think that much of Grid [as a new problem?]. I still need to sell Grid as a distributed computing research solution (storage, scheduling) and be more careful in how discussing Grid with Computer Science. Allen: Also, the grid may be related to how to describe data; it s maybe more of a driver for scientists to describe what they do. The Grid has more social problems [sharing of resources, scheduling ] <panelxscript6jan2005.doc> 2

3 Yes. Perhaps the grid discussion is more a tool discussion, or standards + APIs. Cf. Globus as an engine versus a standard. Panel, what do you think about that? Globus is an implementation not a standard. The importance is in the standards piece: if your grid implementation is standard, whether it s Globus is irrelevant, you re still in the game. Yet Globus Toolkit 4.0 is Open Grid Services Architecture based not OGSI, but Web services Resource Framework. Is standards based good enough to work? Or does it go POSIX way almost there but with so many extensions to work? Allen: There s starting to be a dearth of applications that stress these grid issues. We need something like SAGA [System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses] and implement applications to drive it. The typical higher level of abstraction as to if it can work, would vendors support standards? i.e. would a low level ok be forthcoming? Sure, we [IBM, vendors] participate in standards. Well, let me re-phrase: What will convince vendors to support? Well, how do we prioritize this with existing customer needs? How does one evaluate SAGA? And also it s still a long way to go even on low-level technology. Hmmm, didn t exactly say that Microsoft is missing. Given that the number of Visual Basic code lines has recently exceeded lines of COBOL, we need Microsoft to support. Global Grid Forum needs more representation [from MS and vendors] So, what could this community do to gain momentum in SURA? What kinds of things could come out of this meeting? The sign up [for break out sessions tomorrow morning] tells it all. Few are interested in a testbed, compared to solutions for Authentication/Authorization standards or for application tool kits Consider the EGrid model in Europe: its testbed was self-funded and then it snowballed Perhaps other topics will be more fundamental in contrast to how to implement a grid. own campus? Why a testbed grid [such as in inter-organizational, heterogeneous one] if you can do a grid on your We re overwhelmed with how many testbeds there are. We see so many single purpose grids still, and so many middleware stacks it will lead to more consolidation. Allen: At the same time we need to have testbed to drive heterogeneity we need that heterogeneity [to drive standards Well, there are lots of application testbeds, but not enough Grid grids for services offerings <panelxscript6jan2005.doc> 3

4 value add. I agree. Consider the TeraGrid it s just the connections. Now NSF needs to add services and I have same thought. Maybe need to revise the SURA Testbed Grid more multi-disciplinary grid and geographically bound by community? Lots of value in community expertise campuses did some self-education, learning from SURA Testbed Grid. Still there are hard problems to solve (resource sharing ) Another aspect of the problem: everyone has need for metadata to describe experiments (though still no standards for that.) How many have implemented a grid? [About 30 of attendees responded] How many have done so themselves? [Less than 20 ] Need to interest the Computer Scientists. Consider PlanetLab it s maybe easier to do such a network testbed since the network is their [CS ] work. Harder for grid infrastructure is different than science. And it s hard to get funding for non-domain research Well, [funding] panels seem, recently, to be emphasizing infrastructure investment. What about applications? There are lots of paths, but low infrastructure requirements is often the starting point just do a local, cluster specific, application to understand the application What do you do then [after the application proves out]? [If you re in Texas,] join HiPCAT [High Performance Computing Across Texas] Get familiar with [grid] software. Though, at ATT, a new student is giving Globus a try it s hard. NMI Integration Testbed has instructive model: EDIT and GRID sides. Different approaches: early adopter versus next tier waiting to move forward. EDIT side provided documents, practices, roadmaps; GRID more focused on specific software components. We have to compliment [Or complement? Works either way] Internet2 on middleware integration into Grid. There are still too many uncoordinated efforts need better integration. GridLab is another exemplar. With NMI Integration Testbed, EDIT side was involved up front [from inception of project] on middleware integration. GGF was a bit harder to get involved. Allen: A Roadmap is a good concept means that you can get ready without needing all infrastructure in place. After all, you can write MPI code on a laptop and then frameworks are available to improve application code base. And you re not going to find one solution, need to try and see. It s a hands-under-the-hood method. Have to try solutions in order to appreciate the value-add of vendor solutions or other models [cf. GridLab] CS faculty sees a grid layer on top of the infrastructure, not the maintenance of enterprise infrastructure. CS is looking for application [algorithm?] solutions. <panelxscript6jan2005.doc> 4

5 Vendors provide solutions that s their position. With regard to compute grid versus data grid: there is a storage focus for data grids what about storage scheduling? Does the panel want to comment? We can basically schedule compute nodes, licenses, etc. Actually, data movement scheduling is an issue most storage reservation can be solved by adding (cheaply) 10 Terabyte disk. Definitely more work is needed in storage such as handling data generation streams. Yes, ATT has grid technology internally, but how to handle data streams is an issue. More a bandwidth reservation problem. Storage resource management (SRM) tools exist to handle storage allocation. We see two areas that customers are demanding: 1) InfoGrid (name, data, location) transparency 2) Resource scheduling and allocation (data, network, licenses, CPU ) Data may be the last area to be addressed. <panelxscript6jan2005.doc> 5