[CAnet - news] Future directions for Grid Research

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[Some excerpts from GridToday.  It would appear that from this article that
in the future there will be far less emphasis on grids connecting HPC
facilities and more focus on the challenges of managing huge data sets.
Some excerpts --BSA]

www.gridtoday.com

A Look into the Future of Grid Research
              By Wolfgang Gentzsch, Contributing Author              

  One area is coming up again and again 
  -- and it's data, data, data. I think I am still underestimating this 
  single, largest challenge. How do we bring structure and order into 
  this exploding data hurricane? Exponentially growing data, in many 
  different formats, distributed over many sources and sites around the 
  world, replicated for the sake of international collaborations in 
  virtual organizations -- all this requires sophisticated, scalable and 
  robust data management capabilities. They have to take into account 
  very heavy loads, performance bottlenecks, denial of service attacks 
  and different policies, while still guaranteeing minimum service 
  response time.
  
  Another recurring topic is the wide field of security -- protecting 
  your core business, resources, data, applications, IP and other 
  assets. Although authentication and authorization are well understood 
  and implemented in simple environments, they are still a challenge for 
  global or virtual  organizations in research and industry. 
  Policy-based distributed access control, security credentials and 
  credential renewal for long-running jobs, identity management, group 
  memberships, policy management, attribute-based mutual trust and trust 
  building, resource negotiation, suspicion levels associated with 
  requesters, and general scalability challenges result in central 
  versus decentralized approaches. And, finally, firewalls and 
  conflicting security policies play an important role and obstacle in 
  today's collaboration among multiple organizations.
  
  One important trend is the introduction of Web services as a means for 
  standardized communications in services-oriented and interoperable 
  systems, to expose application functionalities to end-users and to 
  provide wrappers for legacy applications integration. Other 
  contributions to the workshop concentrated on semantic Web 
  technologies and Grids, complex fault scenarios in large distributed 
  systems, (autonomous)  failure detection and self-repairing systems.
  
  The keynote speaker, Dennis Gannon, has been involved in so many 
  distributed and Grid projects that to mention all would go far beyond 
  the scope of this blog. So, HIS voice counts! Extrapolating from his 
  lessons learned in Grid projects like I-Way, IPG, NEESGrid, BIRN, 
  GEONGrid and LEAD, he envisions that data will increasingly become the 
  most demanding challenge. He described progress to this, through 
  Web-form interfaces, and the fusion of data management and 
  interoperable workflow tools. He anticipates building LIGHTWEIGHT Grid 
  infrastructures and a "Google" for Grid data and application services 
  discovery; challenges with scalability of Grid services;  and the 
  virtualization of data storage and computational resources. Are Web 
  services really the right foundation for building Grids? Or even for 
  building the galactic-scale Grid operating system?
  
  Carl Kesselman described 
  the future service-oriented architecture, decomposable and dynamically 
  integrating, with applications as services composed into workflows; 
  on-demand provisioning of resources delivered to services; and the 
  creation virtual communities with the challenge to support dynamic 
  policies and trust, understand what policies will work (and what not), 
  and provide quality of services and agreement mechanisms.  
    

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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.



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