GRID STANDARDS

Grid Standards

 

 

Grid standards have been developed over the years. Well–formed organizations behind those standards include

1.    Open Grid Forum (formally Global Grid Forum)

2.    Object Management Group

3.    OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture)

4.    OGSI (Open Grid Service Infrastructure)

5.    OGSA-DAI

6.    Web services

7.    SAGA (Simple API for Grid Applications)

8.    GSI (Grid Security Infrastructure)

9.    WSRF (Web Service Resource Framework)

 

1.    Open Grid Forum (OGF)

Formally called the Global Grid Forum, OGF is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. OGF has two principal functions – being the standards organization for grid computing, and building communities within the overall grid community

 

2.    Object Management Group

The Object Management Group (OMG) is a computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a range of technologies.

 

3.    OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture)

Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) was developed within the Open Grid Forum. It describes a service-oriented architecture for a grid computing environment for business and scientific use. The standard was specifically developed for the emerging grid and cloud service communities.

The OGSA is extended from web service concepts and technologies. It is intended to support the creation, termination, management, and invocation of stateful, transient grid services via standard interfaces and conventions. The OGSA framework specifies the physical environment, security, infrastructure profile, resource provisioning, virtual domains, and execution environment for various grid services and API access tools.

 

4.    OGSI (Open Grid Service Infrastructure)

OGSA describes the features that are needed for the implementation of services provided by the grid, as web services. It, however, does not provide the details of the implementation. Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) provides a formal and technical specification needed for the implementation of grid services. It provides a description of Web Service Description Language (WSDL), which defines a grid service. OGSI also provides the mechanisms for creation, management and interaction among grid services

 

5.    OGSA-DAI

Open Grid Services Architecture–Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) is a project conceived by the UK Database Task Force. It aims to develop middleware to provide access and integration to distributed data sources using a grid. This middleware provides support for various data sources such as relational and XML databases. These data sources can be queried, updated and transformed via OGSA-DAI web service. These web services can be deployed within a grid, thus making the data sources grid enabled

 

 

6.    Web Services

Grid services, defined by OGSA, is an extension of web services. Important web service specifications include:

1.    eXtensible Markup Language (XML) – It forms the basis of web services. XML is a markup language for sharing of data across different interfaces using a common format.

2.    Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) – Platform independent message–based communication protocol

3.    Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) – is an XML document used to describe the web service interface. Includes information about portType, message, types, binding, port and service

4.    Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) – is an XML–based registry used for finding a web service on the Internet. It is a specification that allows a business to publish information about it and its web services allowing other web services to locate this information. A UDDI registry is an XML-based service listing.

 

7.    SAGA (Simple API for Grid Applications)

The Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA) is a family of related standards specified by the Open Grid Forum to define an application programming interface (API) for common distributed computing functionality. The SAGA Core API specification covers the following areas:

§  security and session management

§  permission management

§  asynchronous operations

§  monitoring

§  asynchronous notifications

§  attribute management

§  I/O buffer management

 

 

8.    GSI (Grid Security Infrastructure)

GSI is a well-known security solution in the grid environment. GSI is a portion of the Globus Toolkit and provides fundamental security services needed to support grids, including supporting for message protection, authentication and delegation, and authorization. GSI enables secure authentication and communication over an open network, and permits mutual authentication across and among distributed sites with single sign-on capability. GSI supports both message-level security and transport-level security.

 

9.    WSRF (Web Service Resource Framework)

WSRF defines a “generic and open framework for modeling and accessing stateful resources using web services”. It defines conventions for state management enabling applications to discover and interact with stateful web services in a standard way. Standard web services do not have a notion of state. Grid-based applications need the notion of state because they often perform a series of requests where output from one operation may depend on the result of previous operations. WS-Resource Framework can be used to develop such stateful grid services. The format of message exchange in WSRF is defined by the WSDL