Wide Area Grid – Technical Requirements

Paul Kopp

Paul Kopp WGISS22 Annapolis 2

Wide Area Grid – Definition and Context

■Definition Structure that could be deployed over several space agencies for

accessing resources that these agencies want to share

■Context Before being deployed, this structure must be defined An industrial study has been launched by CNES

Funded under the auspices of CNES R&D project R-S06/OT-0005-012

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Wide Area Grid - Objectives

■Experimentation of a mechanism which allows the sharing of resources in the frame of one or several programmes led in cooperation

GMES and GEO may be such programmes We limit ourselves to an experimental Wide Area Grid within CEOS

with agencies volunteering to participate Agencies having shown an interest: CNES, ESA, NSAU, NRSCC

■The expected benefit is “working in cooperation” Application sharing Reuse of resources and data that have been made available by Wide

Area Grid participants “resource” to be taken in a broad sense (can be a complex service) The Wide Area Grid must accept many kinds of resources but a single resource

must not saturate the Wide Area Grid

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Wide Area Grid Activity

■Step 1 Analysis of the building blocks required to set up the Wide Area Grid

Standardized grid middleware Additional elements, like

– Workflow mechanism– Service advertising mechanism (ex.: UDDI)– Portal for accessing the Wide Area Grid

Analysis of the constraints Cultural barriers between agencies “best effort” principles

■Step 2 Implementation of a Wide Area Grid Prototype

■Step 3 Experimentation of the prototype

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Wide Area Grid - Requirements

1. The Wide Area Grid is a shared structure among agencies that are geographically distributed■ Each agency offers computers, software, networks■ Each agency remains the owner of these resources■ An agency may leave the Wide Area Grid at any time

2. The Wide Area Grid manages and exploits the resources made available by agencies■ A resource may be defined as a service consisting of several operations. New

resources may be recursively defined from existing resources■ There may be families of resources. A family may be seen as a Wide Area Grid

utilization profile (ex.: “flood monitoring” profile)

3. Wide Area Grid users are persons or organizations. All users are registered users. The user selects a profile when connecting. The user may need to provide the required inputs for resource activation

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Wide Area Grid – Requirements (continued)

4. A user may offer the Wide Area Grid to include additional resources for a given profile. A new resource must be agreed by the Wide Area Grid before inclusion.

5. The Wide Area Grid is a managed entity. The Wide Area Grid Manager acts on behalf of the Wide Area Grid participants.

6. Access to the Wide Area Grid must be offered through a very friendly interface

7. All resources provided by an agency in the frame of the Wide Area Grid may be completely disconnected from the other agency resources (no physical link). If not, security must be provided through an appropriate mechanism (ex.: DMZ).

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Wide Area Grid – Characterization Methodology

■ Enterprise Viewpoint The Wide Area Grid is a commonality set up by CEOS agencies for

hosting and exploiting shared resources. Most resources may be seen as services.

There is no a priori limitation on the number of participants.

■ Computational Viewpoint The Wide Area Grid is a combination of logical elements (to be defined

by the study). These elements interact with each other through interfaces. They behave as information source or information destination.

■ Information Viewpoint Information flowing through the Wide Area Grid must be semantically

identified. This will result in the Wide Area Grid information model.

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Wide Area Grid – Characterization Methodology (continued)

■Engineering Viewpoint The Wide Area Grid elements may be classified according to categories. A category is identified by its interaction type, thus making some

characteristics of an element transparent to the user (ex.: location). Grouping categories together may follow an architecture model (ex.:

multi-tier architecture).

■Technology Viewpoint The Wide area grid will work if there exists at least one solution (to be

defined) which will actually be implementations of each of the other viewpoints.

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Wide Area Grid - Schedule

■Step 1 (Study)End 2006

■Step 2 (Implementation)End 2007

■Step 3 (Experimentation)Starting end 2007

Schedule for the implementation and the experimentation steps will

depend on Wide Area Grid participants!

Paul Kopp WGISS22 Annapolis 10

Thank You!