From Academic To Business Grids

Lessons Learnt at PSNC

Jarek Nabrzyski Applications Deparment Manager

naber@man.poznan.pl

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Outline

PSNC Barriers to Grid Adoption in Business

(based on last week’s EU Challengers workshop in Pisa)

Licensing Issues Towards Business Grids at PSNC

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R&D CenterPSNC was established in 1993 (staff: 180) and is an R&D Center in:

New Generation Networks POZMAN and PIONIER networks 6-NET, SEQUIN, ATRIUM, MUPBED projects

HPC and Grids 5FP: GRIDLAB, CROSSGRID, GRIDSTART 6FP (20/4): HPC-Europa, InteliGrid, GridCoord, CoreGrid, EGEE, BREIN, BeInGrid, ACGT, QoSCoSGrid, Challengers, OMII-Europe,Phosphorus, BalticGrid, g-Eclipse, int.eu.grid,GN2, EXPReS, Qualipso, MUPBED, MAGIX, 2 CELTIC Projects Sun Center of Excellence and Microsoft Innovation Center

Portals and Content Management Tools GridSphere Portal Framework support and development

GridSphere team (6 persons) led by Michael Russell now at PSNC Digital Libraries

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Motivations for this topic at PSNC

PSNC plays many roles in various R&D Grid-related projects

PSNC’s ambition is to transfer Grid and other related technologies to industry and commerce

PSNC is now working on the incubator programme for SMEs to exploit and support Grid technologies

ROI is important to us First spin-offs to be launched in coming months

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Problem

Usually the business idea comes first, then a solution is chosen

In Grids we are looking for a business idea, while the Grid idea is known and many (pilot, but also production) implementations exist

Of course there are many other barriers for commercial Grid adoption

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Barriers for Grid Adoption

Legal barriers Technical barriers Economic/communication barriers Business and organisational barriers Vision barrier

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Legal barriers

Specific legal frameworks of vertical markets (banking/finanse/health/…)

Intensified by country barriers: privacy, security, on-line commerce, tax, digital rights management, export controls etc. e.g. Different policies about treatment of personal

data Trust of grid applications by users needs to be

improved

„pharma firm stopped doing drug discovery on a grid as results not accepted by FDA”

„where large financial services companies said that they'd never deploy Grids beyond their organizations' boundaries. From a regulatory point of view they can't - they're legally not allowed to do so”

„Bank stopped pan-european grid project as auditors warned would not be able to tell where all transactions processed and therefore risked being liable for VAT in more than one country”

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Technological Barriers

A need for one evolving standards roadmap for Grids with emphasis on SOA, semantics and trust/security. The technologies to be standardised are unclear given

the lack of business models. The technological core at low levels of the architecture can be standardised, but how much of the management layers will remain proprietary depends on the business models.

Along with standardization comes the interoperability, or lack of it.

Interface to the Grid

„The creation of the Open Grid Forum from GGF and EGA should advance the technological standards. However, it is necessary that OGSA and W3C Web Services are kept strictly in step to ensure interoperation. At present the architecture appears too complex, too much at middleware software developer level (not end‐user level) and lacks many required features for self‐*. More R&D is needed involving both academics and industry, the latter both IT vendors and end‐users.” Keith Jeffrey

„Grid is still in its infancy. More R&D is still needed” Many authors

„The complexity of the Grid technologies is identified as one of the factors that makes product managers do not use it as the basis of their products solutions.” Eduardo

Oliveros, Telefonica

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Economic and Communication Barriers

Will GRID enable major new market – or will existing markets grow? Many doubt about it.

Will new ecosystem disturb established players? License issues

Academic vs. business objectives. Open or not open source? Lack of clear business models is a problem.

The current model of software application license based on CPU/machine utilization is a model that clearly blocks the use of certain applications on Grid

Fragmentation of effort, including sponsored.

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Business and Organization Barriers

Enterprises are still afraid of exposing internal resources,

Scepticism over virtualization of the service levels

Grid implies large number of suppliers/users with no previous reference

Lack of clear business models Fragmentation of effort, including sponsored… Is is easier to buy (cheap) hardware, if extra

resources are needed

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Open or Not Open? (your source)

Open source often causes many problems to adopt the software by commercial companies, due to: software quality (or the lack of it)

the availability of commercial support;

deliberately disseminated fear, uncertainty and doubt;

license issues and IPR

Depending on a business model the companies choose the right scheme for them

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Open or Not Open? (your source)

For doing science it is often a good solution: Collaborative work: many institutions working

on same problem/project But here many options are available. Which

one is best for me? Globus incubator program and other similar

programs require very often to giving up the copyright and IPR from their contributors.

Recommended Reading

„Grid Licensing: Life in the Middleware Jungle” By Owen Appleton, CERN

In: Grid Today

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Vision Barriers Social and other „soft” benefits

Sharing, recycling The current (used) commercial software

offerings are very conservative and dominantly concern cluster computing. We need intra‐ and inter‐ERP GRIDs;

Many do not believe that building open grid for business is possible even by 2020 Open Grid does not mean that we all use the

same middleware!

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Academic Grids at PSNCAcademic Grids at PSNC

EGrid Testbed Cactus worm Dynamic grid computing 12 sites Presented at SC2000

A basis for GridLab project later

Winning Grand Challenge Competition in 2002 (extended to other centers including US and Korea)

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Other examples of academic Grids at PSNC

Clusterix Progress (bioinformatics) ACGT (cancer research and bioinformatics) Vlab (virtual laboratory) InteliGrid (semantic Grid for engineering) EGEE CrossGrid Baltic Grid HPC-Europa

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Transfering Grids to Industry

More business oriented projects at PSNC (e.g. InteliGrid, BREIN, BeInGrid, QoSCoSGrid, ACGT)

PSNC’s incubator program underway Microsoft Innovation Center activities Wielkopolska Center of Advanced Technologies Using structural funds to help SMEs CELTIC projects (strong business models)

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Towards Commercial Grids:Gridge and FedStage

Based mostly on GridLab and Progress, productized over last 18 months)

Open Source (Apache2) Fully Integrated with GT 2 and 4 Services based bussines model (free

for EU projects) Mostly addressed to academia Proposed to many Grid deployment

projects as a basic Grid infrastructure New requirements/features coming

mostly from research projects Fully documented Temporarily at:

fury.man.poznan.pl/gridge/

Developed from scratch Codes available only for some pieces

(DRMAA Service Provider available at SourceForge)

Uses federated services specifications (Liberty Alliance, OASIS, IETF, W3C, OGF)

Globus independent Strong business security and

interoperability requieremnts Mostly addressed to commerce Integrated with Sun Grid Market system

(Singapore) Integration with eXludus’s solutions Available (with support) soon through

FedStage Systems Inc.

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Building Grid infrastructures and

applications with Gridge

More than just a prototype! Integrated, almost complete

Grid solution. Supports new dynamic

scenarios. Fully open source! Productization by PSNC

with commercial support. Being deployed and

extended in more than 20 other projects!

Compliant with GGF standards (GRM, SAGA, GSA, …).

GridSphere is 100% JSR 168 compliant

Many advanced Grid scenarios implemented using Gridge

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FedStage Nowadays, loosely coupled software systems, platforms and computing/data services

need to be integrated, linked and coordinated over networks in a standardized way. Standardization bodies such as Liberty Alliance, WS-I, OASIS, GGF, IETF, W3C, etc.

have released recently a set of open ready-to-implement standards and protocols that can be used to enable and improve the interoperability among distributed services and computing resources.

Taking into account strong security and trust requirements, we have developed production quality FedStage* solutions to help service integrators, providers and consumers to take advantage of sharing computing and data services across company borders and domains within a circle of trust

We facilitate the design and deployment processes of new-generation enterprises based on computing and storage services-on-demand accessible through Identity-based Web Services over the Intra/Internet.

* FedStage services have been developed from scratch based on our experiences and lessons learnt from previous projects (including PROGRESS and GridLab)

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FedStage generic architecture Interoperability, Peformance, Security are the key issues and therefore

FedStage AAA-based solutions are of primary importance for the cross-organization sharing of applications, data, and computational services in a collaborative business environment today.

FedStage products follow Liberty Alliance and WS-I standards as well as other industry standards W3C standards:  XML, SOAP OASIS standards: WS-Notification, WS-Reliability, WS-Security, SAML2.0 OGF/GGF standards: DRMAA, JSDL IETF standards: SSL/TLS

to enable the interoperability among FedStage and various vendors products.

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Available FedStage products/services (IVQ 2006)

FedStage Identity Provider/Manger FedStage Authorization Provider/Manager FedStage Accounting Provider FedStage Notification Provider FedStage Computing Provider

Remote Interfaces/protocols: Web Services over SSL / SAML2.0 / WS-Security, ID-WSF 2.0 support, JSDL 1.0, WS-Notification, DRMAA 1.0Built in support for Authentication, Authorization, and AccountingDistributed Resource Managers: Sun Grid Engine (SGEv6u7), Condor 6.8.2 and higher), PBS/TorqueComputing Nodes and Platforms: Solaris, Linux, Unix, Mac, Windows

FedStage Computing Provider is able to handle more than 20 job requests per second, around 2.000.000 job requests per day, up to 1000 users requests over Web Services and message level security mechanisms.

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Summary Looking forward to removing the barriers for

Grids (not that easy) Go commercial if you have a bright idea and

few persons willing to take a risk Start with your business idea! Carefully plan the steps and the technologies

you want to use. Use industry approved standards where

possible. Be carefull, technolgy is not the only limitation!

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Thank you!