UNIT II

GRID SERVICES
Introduction to Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) – Motivation – Functionality
Requirements – Practical & Detailed view of OGSA/OGSI – Data intensive grid service
models – OGSA services.

2.1. Introduction to OGSA:

Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)

The OGSA is an open source grid service standard jointly developed by academia and the
IT industry under coordination of a working group in the Global Grid Forum (GGF). The
standard was specifically developed for the emerging grid and cloud service communities.
OGSA Framework
The OGSA was built on two basic software technologies: the Globus Toolkit
widely adopted as a grid technology solution for scientific and technical computing, and web
services (WS 2.0) as a popular standards-based framework for business and network
applications. The OGSA 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.
OGSA Interfaces
The OGSA is centered on grid services. These services demand special well-
defined application interfaces. These interfaces provide resource discovery, dynamic service
creation, lifetime management, notification, and manageability. Two key properties of a grid
service are transience and statefulness. These properties have significant implications regarding
how a grid service is named, discovered, and managed. Being transient means the service can be
created and destroyed dynamically; statefulness refers to the fact that one can distinguish one
service instance from another.
Grid Service Handle

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 A GSH is a globally unique name that distinguishes a specific grid service
instance from all others. The OGSA employs a “handle-resolution” mechanism for mapping
from a GSH to a GSR. The GSH must be globally defined for a particular
Instance.
Grid Service Migration
This is a mechanism for creating new services and specifying assertions regarding
the lifetime of a service. The OGSA model defines a standard interface, known as a factor, to
implement this reference. Any service that is created must address the former services as the
reference of later services. Each dynamically created grid service instance is associated with a
specified lifetime.
OGSA Security Models
The OGSA supports security enforcement at various levels. The grid works in a
heterogeneous distributed environment, which is essentially open to the general public. At the
security policy and user levels, we want to apply a service or endpoint policy, resource mapping
rules, authorized access of critical resources, and privacy protection. At the Public Key
Infrastructure (PKI) service level, the OGSA demands security binding with the security protocol
stack and bridging of certificate authorities (CAs), use of multiple trusted intermediaries, and so
on. Trust models and secure logging are often practiced in grid platforms.

Table: OGSA Grid Service Interfaces Developed by the OGSA Working Group

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OGSA Emergence:

1. There is no universally accepted grid architecture before OGSA.

2. Grid is constructed by virtually pooling computing resources and making them readily
available through a network.
3. Many of the underlying issues of grid can be resolved by Web services technologies.
4. The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) represents an evolution towards a Grid
system architecture based on Web services concepts and technologies.
5. OGSA emerged as a standard that defines a technique for describing software
components to be accessed, methods for accessing these components, and discovery
methods that enable the identification of relevant service providers.
6. OGSA architecture is service oriented and is well suited for distributed applications.
7. They allow us to create loosely coupled client/server applications.
8. Globus Toolkit™ has emerged as the de facto standard for several important
Connectivity, Resource, and Collective protocols that are used in OGSA.
9. Detailed technical specifications are being developed for architecture elements like
security, data, resource management, information.
10. The first underlying specification for OGSA was named Open Grid Services
Infrastructure (OGSI), a joint effort developed in 2002 between IBM and the Globus
Alliance for grid-enabled services.
11. The OGSA's building blocks (OGSI) are based on the Web Services Resource
Framework (WSRF).
12. The WSRF is a set of web service specifications being developed by the OASIS --
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards .
13. The WSRF and WS-Notification (WSN) specification describe how to implement OGSA
capabilities using Web services.

2.1.1. Architecture of OGSA

Comprised of 4 main layers
– Grid Applications Layer
– OGSA Architected Grid Services Layer ( core, program execution and data
services)
– Web Service Layer ( including OGSI)

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 – Physical and Logical Resources Layer

Fig: Architecture of OGSA

1. Physical And Logical resource Layer:
• Physical resources are: servers, storage, network ( physical devices)
• Logical resources manage physical resources
– Examples of logical resources: database managers, workflow managers, security
manager, file manager, directory manager, message manager etc..
2. Web Services Layer:
 Web service is software available online that could interact with other software using
XML.
 Consists of Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) sub-layer which specifies grid
services and provide consistent way to interact with grid services and also extends Web
Service Capabilities
 Web Services Layer (OGSI)

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  Consists of 5 interfaces:
o Factory: provide way for creation of new grid services
o Life Cycle: Manages grid service life cycles
 Soft state approach: Every instance is created with a specific lifetime.
 Initial lifetime can be extended by explicit client request.
 Client can always know when the Grid Service will terminate.
 Resource consumption at hosting environment is always bounded.
o State Management: Manage grid service states ( stateful and stateless)
 State- stateful and stateless:
 Stateful means the computer or program keeps track of the state of
interaction, usually by setting values in a storage field designated for that
purpose.
 Stateless means there is no record of previous interactions and each
interaction request has to be handled based entirely on information that
comes with it.
 Stateful and stateless are derived from the usage of state as a set of
conditions at a moment in time
o Service Groups: collection of indexed grid services
o Notification: Manages notification between services & resources ( uses third party
messaging service)
o Handle Map :
 return Grid service reference (GSR) associated with Grid Service Handle
(GSH)
 Every Grid Service instance is always registered with at least one home
handlemap.
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  GSH includes the handleMap's identity.
 All handleMap services are also identified by a URL.
 Two steps:
1. Identifying a handleMap service that contains the mapping for
the specified GSH.
2. contacting that handleMap to obtain the desired GSR.
3. OGSA Architected Services – Layer:

 Classified into 3 service categories

o Grid Core Services
o Grid Program Execution Services
o Grid Data Services
• Additionally any domain specific services, only if required
i. Grid Core Services:
Composed of 4 main types of services:
1. Service Management: assist in services like installation, maintenance, &
troubleshooting tasks in grid system
2. Service Communication: include functions that allow grid services to
communicate
3. Policy Services: Provide framework for creation, administration &
management of policies for system operation
4. Security Services: provide authentication & authorization mechanisms to
ensure systems interoperate securely

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 ii. Grid Program Execution Services
 Supports unique grid systems in high performance computing,
collaboration, parallelism and virtualisation
 Support virtualization of resource processing
 Distributed logging
iii. Grid Data Services
 Support data virtualization
 Provide mechanism for access to distributed data resources such as databases,
files etc in terms of
o Data description
o Data access and movement
o Data factory ( dictionary)
o Data management
o Data replication / caching
o Metadata management
o Data integrity
4. Grid Applications Layer:
This layer comprise of applications that use the grid architected services

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2.2 Motivation (Intention for OGSA):

1. Facilitate use and management of resources and data across distributed, heterogeneous
environments.

2. Deliver seamless non trivial QoS.

3. Define open, published interfaces in order to provide interoperability of diverse

resources.

4. Exploit industry-standard integration technologies.

5. Develop standards that achieve interoperability.

6. Integrate, virtualize, and manage services and resources in a distributed, heterogeneous

environment.

7. Deliver functionality as loosely coupled, interacting services aligned with industry-

accepted web service standards.

2.3. OGSA – Functionality Requirements

1. Basic functions: includes discovery and brokering, virtual organizations, data sharing,
monitoring and policy

2. Security functions: includes multiple security infrastructures, authentication,

authorization, accounting and instantiate new services

3. Resource management functions: includes advance reservation, notification/messaging,

scheduling, load balancing, logging, disaster recovery, workflow management, fault
tolerance and self-healing capabilities

o Discovery of resources.
o Instantiating new service.
o Service-level management to meet user expectations.
o Enabling metering and Accounting to quantify resource usage into pricing units.
o Monitoring resource usage and availability.

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 o Managing service policies.
o Providing service grouping and aggregation to provide better indexing and
information.
o Managing end-to-end security.
o Servicing life cycle and change management.
o Failure management.
o Provisioning Management.
o Workload management.

o Load balancing to provide a scalable system .

2.3.1. Types of Requirements:

i. The Global grid forum has started developing a standard for grid computing in the
form of OGSA/OGSI where they need to understand the basic requirements of
the grid along with purpose, functions and details.
ii. The aim of GGF is to design a standard and produce a document which should
focus on identifying the requirements for OGSA services and components.
The various types of requirements of OGSA are:
a. Functionality
b. Security
c. Resource management
d. System properties
e. Quality of Service requirements
f. Data service requirements
g. Administrative Cost Reduction Requirements

2.3.1.1. Functionality Requirements:

 Discovery and brokering

 Mechanisms to discover and allocate services, data and resources
– Service brokers check availability of
• Software and hardware
• Identify codes and platform for execution
 Metering and auditing

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  Metering to record usage and duration ( both devices and licenses)
– Accounting audits the usage based on metering
 Data sharing and management
 Manages data archives, data in cache,
 Ensure data consistency for indexing , metadata
 Deployment
 Deploy data in the hosting environment for execution
 Deploy application executables for running apps
 Virtual Organizations(VO’s)
 Create a VO in the grid to provide resources to customer’s job
 Negotiate with other grid, if required, to either share data or resources
 Application monitoring
 Two levels of monitoring
 Low level – Resources management
 High Level – Business process management
 Users can monitor their job
 Cross organisational view of resources
 Fail over management
 Policy
 Platforms
 Mechanisms
 Administrative environments

2.3.1.2. Security Requirements

 Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting

 To enter and use the apps/data in the grid
 Encryption
 Data encryption while transmission from one location to another
 Multilevel security infrastructure
 Its distributed environment, single password, multilevel security
 Perimeter security solutions

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  Providing security on either side of firewall…outside firewall
security is called perimeter security
 Application and network level firewalls
 Two levels of firewall(Shown in Below Diagram)
 Certification
 Certifications from trusted party

2.3.1.3. Resource Management Requirements

 Provisioning

– CPU, storage, network, application, sensor instruments, licences require proper

provisioning ( allocation).. These must be uniform and consistent

 Resource virtualisation

– Dynamic provisioning of these resources virtually ( without customer knowledge)

 Resource usage optimisation

– All resources to be effectively used

 Management and monitoring

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 – Constant monitoring of tasks and Conflict resolution management` when required

 Processor scavenging

– Cache cleaning and making more processor power available to tasks

 Load balancing

– Dynamic allocation of jobs to various resources to optimize load

 Advanced reservation

– Application execution to happen on reserved resources

 Pricing
– Billing services based on metering of time and use of resources ( e.g skynet)
 Self healing
– Application level / Database level rollback facility, heartbeat between servers /
storage devices etc to ensure this

2.3.1.4. System Properties Requirements

 Fault tolerance
– Load distribution, failover mechanisms, Disaster recovery, replication ensures
fault tolerance
 Disaster recovery
– Remote data back up centre ensures this
 Strong monitoring
 Legacy application management
– Extra care on legacy systems ( as no modification / no source code )
 Administration and aggregation of services
– Multi services involved..so admin of these services is required

2.3.1.5. Quality of Service Requirements

 Service level agreement:

– Negotiation between service requester and provider prior to service execution.

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 – Standard mechanisms should be provided to create and manage agreements
 Service level attainment:
– Mechanisms for monitoring service quality, estimating resource utilization,
and planning for and adjusting resource usage are required
 Migration:
– Migrate executing services or applications to adjust workloads for
performance or availability

2.3.1.6. Data Service Requirements

 Policy specification & management.

 Data storage.
 Data access.
 Data transfer.
 Data location management.
 Data update.
 Data persistency.
 Data federation

2.3.1.7. Administrative Cost Reduction Requirements

 Policy-based management
 Application contents management
 Problem determination
 Scalability
 Availability
 Ease of Use and Extensibility

2.4. Practical & Detailed view of OGSA/OGSI:

History of OGSI:
Jun 2001: Steve Tuecke (Globus) wrote initial internal draft OGSI specification
Sep 2001: IBM joined effort, and substantially ramped up the pace.
Feb 2002: Globus & IBM introduced draft OGSI specification at GGF4, proposed wg
Mar 2002: Globus OGSI Tech Preview v1,Sep 2002, Nov 2002, Jan 2003: Meetings

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 Apr 2003: Enter final public comment period
Jul 2003: GGF “proposed recommendation” It is a formal and technical specification of
the concept described in OGSA.
Describes the procedure for creating, managing and exchanging data among entities
known as grid services.
OGSA services are built around OGSI mechanisms. ( OGSI is considered as building
blocks).
OGSI specification defines grid services and builds upon web services. Its a detailed
specification of how Grid Services work.
The Globus Toolkit is an implementation of OGSI.
GT3 includes a complete implementation of OGSI.
Some other implementations are OGSI::Lite (Perl)1 and the UNICORE OGSA
demonstrator2 from the EU GRIP project.
OGSI creates an extension model for WSDL called GWSDL (Grid WSDL).
The reason is:
 Interface inheritance.
 Service Data (for expressing state information).
 Components:
i. Lifecycle
ii. State management
iii. Service Groups
iv. Factory
v. Notification
vi. Handle Map
Web “Services” for OGSI:
 For OGSI, Web Services = WSDL.
– OGSI is defined in terms of WSDL port Types, messages, and XML Schema
types.
– OGSI is largely silent on WSDL binding and service.
What are Web Services?
 It is yet another distributed middleware technology (just like CORBA, RMI, EJBs, etc.).

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  What sets it apart: Clean separation between interface (what the service does) and
implementation (how it does it).
 Based on standard interoperable languages (XML).
 Widespread use and abundant software available.

Separation of interface and implementation Interface is defined in an XML language

called WSDL (Web Services Description Language). üWSDL is language and platform-neutral,
and allows the interface to be defined separately from the particular transport protocol or data
encoding used in the actual message passing.
Example: A GNU/Linux client can access a web service in a Windows server using protocol A,
while a different client using Solaris might use protocol B We can use web services to build
SOAs (ServiceOriented Architectures) Architecture in which an application uses several
independent services (or loosely coupled services) that cooperate to undertake a common task.
“Loosely coupled”: A change in the implementation of one service doesn't affect the
other services. SOAs improve interoperability and reusability.
Why are Web Services ideal for OGSA and, in general, for Grid systems?
Can easily cope with heterogeneous systems (different programming languages,
platforms, etc.).

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Common interface language (WSDL) allows:
Virtualization: from a pool of services (with the same interface) I can access any service in the
same fashion regardless of vendor, platform, etc. ü Dynamic service indexing and discovery.
ü Dynamic access to services.
OGSI Implementations…
i. Globus Toolkit version 3.0 (Java, C client)
ii. U Virginia OGSI.NET (.NET)
iii. LBNL pyGlobus (Python)
iv. U Edinburgh (.NET)
v. U Manchester (PERL)
vi. Fujitsu Unicore (Java)
Relevant Standards Organizations…
i. GGF: Grid services: OGSI/A, WS-Agreement
ii. W3C: Web services: WSDL, SOAP
iii. OASIS: Web services security, WSDM, SAML
iv. IETF: Internet protocols and security
v. Project Liberty Alliance: Identity federation
vi. DMTF: Common Information Model (CIM)

2.4.1. Detailed view of OGSA/OGSI…

The OGSA integrates key grid technologies with Web services mechanisms to create a
distributed system framework based on the OGSI. ü A grid service instance is a service that
conforms to a set of conventions, expressed as WSDL interfaces, extensions, and behaviors, for
such purposes as lifetime management, discovery of characteristics, and notification.
OGSI defines a component model that extends WSDL and XML schema definition to
incorporate the concepts of:
• Statefull Web services
• Extension of Web services interfaces
• Asynchronous notification of state change
• References to instances of services
• Collections of service instances
• Service state data that augment the constraint capabilities of XML schema definition

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The OGSI specifies:
(1) How grid service instances are named and referenced.
(2) The base, common interfaces that all grid services implement.
(3) The additional interfaces and behaviors associated with factories and service groups.
2.4.1.1 Main issues are…
i. Setting the Context:
GGF calls OGSI the “base for OGSA.”
Specifically, there is a relationship between OGSI and distributed object systems and
also a relationship between OGSI and the existing Web services framework
ii. Relationship to Distributed Object Systems:
Grid service instances are made accessible to client applications through the use of a grid
service handle(GSH) and a grid service reference (GSR).
A client application can use a grid service reference to send requests, represented by the
operations defined in the portType(s) of the target service description directly to the specific
instance at the specified network-attached service endpoint identified by the grid service
reference.
iii. Client-Side Programming Patterns:
 OGSI exploits an important component of the Web services framework: the use of
WSDL to describe multiple protocol bindings, encoding styles, messaging styles, and
so on, for a given Web service.
 The Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) and Java API for XML RPC (JAX-
RPC) are among the many examples of infrastructure software that provide this
capability.
 A proxy provides a client-side representation of remote service instance’s interface.
 Proxy behaviors specific to a particular encoding and network protocol are encapsulated
in a protocol-specific (binding-specific) stub.
 This includes both application-specific services and common infrastructure services that
are defined by OGSA.
iv. Client Use of Grid Service Handles and Reference
 A grid service handle (GSH) can be thought of as a permanent network pointer
to a particular grid service instance.

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  The client resolves a GSH into a GSR by invoking a Handle Resolver grid service
instance identified by some out-of-band mechanism.
 The Handle Resolver may have the GSR stored in a local cache.
 The Handle Resolver may need to invoke another Handle Resolver to resolve the
GSH.
v. Relationship to Hosting Environment:
 OGSI does not dictate a particular service-provider side implementation
architecture.
 A container implementation may provide a range of functionality beyond simple
argument demarshalling.
vi. The Grid Service:
 The purpose of the OGSI document is to specify the (standardized) interfaces
and behaviors that define a grid service.
 In brief, a grid service is a WSDL-defined service that conforms to a set of
conventions relating to its interface definitions and behaviors.
vii. Service Description and Service Instance:
 One can distinguish in OGSI between the description of a grid service and an
instance of a grid service:
 A grid service description describes how a client interacts with service
instances.
 This description is independent of any particular instance.
 Within a WSDL document, the grid service description is embodied in the most
derived portType of the instance, along with its associated portTypes bindings,
messages, and types definitions.
 A grid service description may be simultaneously used by any number of grid
service instances, each of which:
– Embodies some state with which the service description describes how
to interact.
– Has one or more grid service handles.
– Has one or more grid service references to it.
 A service description is used primarily for two purposes:

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  First, as a description of a service interface, it can be used by tooling to
automatically generate client interface proxies, server skeletons, and so forth.
 Second, it can be used for discovery, for example, to find a service instance that
implements a particular service description, or to find a factory that can create
instances with a particular service description.
viii. XML Element Lifetime Declaration Properties:
 Service Data elements may represent instantaneous observations of the dynamic state
of a service instance, it is critical that consumers of serviceData be able to understand
the valid lifetimes of these observations.
 The three lifetimes declaration properties are:
i. ogsi: goodFrom1:
Declares the time from which the content of the element is said to be valid. This is
typically the time at which the value was created.
ii. ogsi: goodUntil:
Declares the time until which the content of the element is said to be valid. This
property must be greater than or equal to the good From time.
iii. ogsi: availableUntil:
Declares the time until which this element itself is expected to be available,
perhaps with updated values. Prior to this time, a client should be able to obtain an
updated copy of this element

2.5.2. Practical view of OGSA/OGSI:

 It is called architecture because it is mainly about describing and building a well-defined
set of interfaces from which systems can be built, based on open standards such as
WSDL.
The objectives of OGSA are:
 Manage resources across distributed heterogeneous platforms.
 Support QoS-oriented Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
 The topology of grids is often complex; the interactions between/among grid resources
are almost invariably dynamic.
 It is critical that the grid provide robust services such as authorization, access control, and
delegation

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  Provide a common base for autonomic management.
 A grid can contain a plethora of resources, along with an abundance of combinations of
resource configurations, conceivable resource-to-resource interactions, and a litany of
changing state and failure modes.
 Intelligent self-regulation and autonomic management of these resources is highly
desirable.
 Define open, published interfaces and protocols for the interoperability of diverse
resources.
 OGSA is an open standard managed by a standards body. Exploit industry standard
integration technologies and leverage existing solutions where appropriate.
 The foundation of OGSA is rooted in Web services, for example, SOAP and WSDL, are
a major part of this specification.
 A grid service capability could be comprised of computational resources, storage
resources, networks, programs, databases, and so on.
 A grid service implements one or more interfaces, where each interface defines a set of
method operations that is invoked by constructing a method call through, method
signature adaptation using SOAP.
 There are two fundamental requirements for describing Web services based on the
OGSI:
 The ability to describe interface inheritance—a basic concept with most of the distributed
object systems.
 The ability to describe additional information elements with the interface definitions.

2.5. Data intensive grid service models

Applications in the grid are normally grouped into two categories:
i. Computation-intensive
ii. Data intensive
i. Data intensive applications deals with massive amounts of data.
The grid system must specially designed to discover, transfer and manipulate the
massive data sets.
Transferring the massive data sets is a time consuming task.

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 Data access method is also known as caching, which is often applied to enhance data
efficiency in a grid environment.
By replicating the same data block and scattering them in multiple regions in a grid, users
can access the same data.
Replication strategies determine when and where to create a replica of the data.
The strategies of replications can be classified as:
i. Static.
ii. Dynamic.
i. Static method:
The locations and number of replicas are determined in advance and will not be
modified.
Replication operation require little overhead.
Static strategic cannot adapt to changes in demand, bandwidth and storage
variability.
Optimization is required to determine the location and number of data replicas.
ii. Dynamic method:
Dynamic strategies can adjust locations and number of data replicas according to
change in conditions.
Frequent data moving operations can result in much more overhead the static
strategies.
Optimization may be determined based on whether the data replica is being
created, deleted or moved.
The most common replication include preserving locality, minimizing update.
• Methods to handle data efficiently
– Data Replication (High availability)
– Unified Namespace ( unique identification)
– Grid Data Access Models
• Monadic model
• Hierarchical model
• Federation model
• Hybrid model

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Grid data Access models…
Multiple participants may want to share the same data collection. To retrieve any piece of
data, we need a grid with a unique global namespace. Similarly, we desire to have unique file
names. To achieve these, we have to resolve inconsistencies among multiple data objects bearing
the same name. Access restrictions may be imposed to avoid confusion. Also, data needs to be
protected to avoid leakage and damage. Users who want to access data have to be authenticated
first and then authorized for access. In general, there are four access models for organizing a data
grid.
Monadic model: This is a centralized data repository model, All the data is saved in a
central data repository. When users want to access some data they have to submit requests
directly to the central repository. No data is replicated for preserving data locality. This model is
the simplest to implement for a small grid. For a large grid, this model is not efficient in terms of
performance and reliability. Data replication is permitted in this model only when fault tolerance
is demanded.

Hierarchical model: The hierarchical model, is suitable for building a large data grid
which has only one large data access directory. The data may be transferred from the source to a
second-level center. Then some data in the regional center is transferred to the third-level center.
After being forwarded several times, specific data objects are accessed directly by users.
Generally speaking, a higher-level data center has a wider coverage area. It provides higher
bandwidth for access than a lower-level data center. PKI security services are easier to
implement in this hierarchical data access model.

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 Federation model: This data access model is better suited for designing a data grid with
multiple sources of data supplies. Sometimes this model is also known as a mesh model. The
data sources are distributed to many different locations. Although the data is shared, the data
items are still owned and controlled by their original owners. According to predefined access
policies, only authenticated users are authorized to request data from any data source. This mesh
model may cost the most when the number of grid institutions becomes very large.

Hybrid model: The model combines the best features of the hierarchical and mesh
models. Traditional data transfer technology, such as FTP, applies for networks with lower
bandwidth. Network links in a data grid often have fairly high bandwidth, and other data transfer
models are exploited by high-speed data transfer tools such as GridFTP developed with the

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Globus library. The cost of the hybrid model can be traded off between the two extreme models
for hierarchical and mesh-connected grids.

Data replication and Unified Namespace:

This data access method is also known as caching, which is often applied to
enhance data efficiency in a grid environment. By replicating the same data blocks and scattering
them in multiple regions of a grid, users can access the same data with locality of references.
Furthermore, the replicas of the same data set can be a backup for one another. Some key data
will not be lost in case of failures. The increase in storage requirements and network bandwidth
may cause additional problems.
Replication strategies determine when and where to create a replica of the data.
The factors to consider include data demand, network conditions, and transfer cost. The
strategies of replication can be classified into method types: dynamic and static. Dynamic
strategies can adjust locations and number of data replicas according to changes in conditions.
The most common replication strategies include preserving locality, minimizing
update costs, and maximizing profits.

2.6. OGSA Services:

The OGSA developed within the OGSA Working Group of the Global Grid Forum, is a service-
oriented architecture that aims to define a common, standard, and open architecture for grid-
based applications. “Open” refers to both the process to develop standards and the standards
themselves. In OGSA, everything from registries, to computational tasks, to data resources is
considered a service.
These extensible set of services are the building blocks of an OGSA-based grid.

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OGSA is intended to:
• Facilitate use and management of resources across distributed, heterogeneous
Environments
• Deliver seamless QoS
• Define open, published interfaces in order to provide interoperability of diverse
resources
• Exploit industry-standard integration technologies
• Develop standards that achieve interoperability
• Integrate, virtualize, and manage services and resources in a distributed, heterogeneous
environment
• Deliver functionality as loosely coupled, interacting services aligned with industry
accepted web service standards.
OGSI, developed by the Global Grid Forum, gives a formal and technical specification of
a grid service. Grid service interfaces correspond to portTypes in WSDL. The set of portTypes
supported by a grid service, along with some additional information relating to versioning, are
specified in the grid service’s serviceType, a WSDL extensibility element defined by OGSA. The
interfaces address discovery, dynamic service creation, lifetime management, notification, and
manageability; whereas the conventions address naming and upgradeability. Grid service
implementations can target native platform facilities for integration with, and of, existing IT
infrastructures.
1. Infrastructure Services Refer to a set of common functionalities, such as naming,
typically required by higher level services.
2. Execution Management Services Concerned with issues such as starting and managing
tasks, including placement, provisioning, and life-cycle management. Tasks may range
from simple jobs to complex workflows or composite services.
3. Data Management Services Provide functionality to move data to where it is needed,
maintain replicated copies, run queries and updates, and transform data into new formats.
These services must handle issues such as data consistency, persistency, and integrity. An
OGSA data service is a web service that implements one or more of the base data
interfaces to enable access to, and management of, data resources in a distributed
environment. The three base interfaces, Data Access, Data Factory, and Data

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 Management, define basic operations for representing, accessing, creating, and managing
data.

4. Resource Management Services Provide management capabilities for grid resources:

management of the resources themselves, management of the resources as grid
components, and management of the OGSA infrastructure. For example, resources can be
monitored, reserved, deployed, and configured as needed to meet application QoS
requirements. It also requires an information model (semantics) and data model
(representation) of the grid resources and services.

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 5. Security Services Facilitate the enforcement of security-related policies within a (virtual)
organization, and supports safe resource sharing. Authentication, authorization, and
integrity assurance are essential functionalities provided by these services.
6. Information Services Provide efficient production of, and access to, information about
the grid and its constituent resources. The term “information” refers to dynamic data or
events used for status monitoring; relatively static data used for discovery; and any data
that is logged. Troubleshooting is just one of the possible uses for information provided
by these services.
7. Self-Management Services Support service-level attainment for a set of services (or
resources), with as much automation as possible, to reduce the costs and complexity of
managing the system. These services are essential in addressing the increasing
complexity of owning and operating an IT infrastructure.

Important Questions:
Marks: 16
1. Explain Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) in detail?
2. Explain OGSA Services?
3. WHAT IS OGSA/OGSI? A PRACTICAL VIEW
4. What is OGSA/OGSI? A More Detailed View
5. Explain Data intensive grid service models?
6. What are the various OGSA Services?
 Handle Resolution
 Virtual Organization Creation and Management
 Service Groups and Discovery Services
 Choreography, Orchestrations and Workflow
 Transactions
 Metering Service
 Rating Service
 Accounting Service
 Billing and Payment Service
 Installation, Deployment, and Provisioning
 Distributed Logging
 Messaging and Queuing
 Event
 Policy and Agreements
 Base Data Services
 Other Data Services
 Discovery Services
 Job Agreement Service
 Reservation Agreement Service
 Data Access Agreement Service

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  Queuing Service
 Open Grid Services Infrastructure
 Common Management Model

Marks:2
1. What are the major goals of OGSA?
o Identify the use cases that can drive the OGSA platform components.
o Identify and define the core OGSA platform components.
o Define hosting and platform specific bindings.
o Define resource models and resource profiles with interoperable solutions.

2. What are the more specific goals of OGSA?

o Facilitating distributed resource management across heterogeneous platforms
o Providing seamless quantity of service delivery.
o Providing common infrastructure building blocks to avoid “Stove pipe solutions towers”.
o Open and published interfaces and messages.

3. What are the main purposes of use case defined by OGSA?

o To identify and define core OGSA platform functionalities.
o To define core platform components based on the functionality requirements.
o To define the high level requirements on those core components and identify their
interrelationship.

4. List out the categories of OGSA services?

o Infrastructure Services
o Execution Management Services
o Data Management Services
o Resource Management Services
o Security Services
o Information Services
o Self-Management Services

5.what are the benefits of OGSI standard ?

o Increased effective computing capacity.
o Interoperability of resources.
o Speed of application development.

6.What are The objectives of OGSA ?

o Manage resources across distributed heterogeneous platforms.
o Support QoS-oriented Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
o It is critical that the grid provide robust services such as authorization, access control,
and delegation.
o Provide a common base for autonomic management.
o Define open, published interfaces and protocols for the interoperability of diverse
resources. OGSA is an open standard managed by a standards body.

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7. what are two fundamental requirements for describing Web services based on the
OGSI?
The ability to describe interface inheritance—a basic concept with most of the distributed
object systems.The ability to describe additional information elements with the interface
definitions.

8.what is a Grid Service Instance

A grid service instance is a (potentially transient) service that conforms to a set of
conventions, expressed as WSDL interfaces, extensions, and behaviors, for such purposes as
lifetime management, discovery of characteristics,and notification.

9.what is grid service description?

A grid service description describes how a client interacts with service instances.This
description is independent of any particular instance. Within a WSDL document, the grid service
description is embodied in the most derived portType of the instance, along with its associated
portTypes,bindings, messages, and types definitions.

10.name the few use cases of OGSA?

o National fusion collaboration
o IT infrastructure and management
o Commercial data centers
o Service-based distributed query processing
o Severe storm prediction
o Online media and entertainment

11. what are the Basic Functionality Requirements of OGSA/Grids?

o Discovery and brokering.
o Metering and accounting.
o Data sharing.
o Deployment
o Virtual organizations (VOs).
o Monitoring.
o Policy.

12.what are the Grids security requirements ?

o Multiple security infrastructures.
o Perimeter security solutions
o Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting.
o Encryption.
o Application and Network-Level Firewalls..
o Certification.

13.name the few Resource Management Requirements?

o Provisioning.
o Resource virtualization.
o Transport management
o Access

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 o Management and monitoring
o Load balancing

14.what are the System Properties Requirements?

o Fault tolerance
o Disaster recovery.
o Strong monitoring
o Legacy application management.

15. what are the Four Grid Families Identified in the Great Global Grid (GGG)?
o Computational Grids or Data Grids
o Information Grids or Knowledge Grids
o Business Grids
o P2P/Volunteer Grids

16.mention the few Grid Data Access Models?

o Monadic model.
o Hierarchical model.
o Federation model.
o Hybrid model.

17. Name some representational use cases from OGSA architecture working group?
o Commercial Data Center (Commercial grid)
o National Fusion Collaboratory (Science grid)
o Online Media and Entertainment (Commercial grid)

18. What are the layers available in OGSA architectural organizations?

o Native platform services and transport mechanisms.
o OGSA hosting environment.
o OGSA transport and security.
o OGSA infrastructure (OGSI).
o OGSA basic services (meta-OS and domain services)

19. What are the OGSA basic services?

o Common Management Model (CMM)
o Service domains
o Distributed data access and replication.
o Policy, security
o Provisioning and resource management.

20.what is meant by CPU scavenging.

The concept of creating a “grid” from the unused resources in a network of computers is known
as CPU scavenging.
21. What are the basic goals of GGF?

• Create an open process for the development of the grid agreements and specifications.

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• Create grid specifications, architecture documents and best practice guidelines.

• Manage and version controls the documents and specifications.

• Handle intellectual property policies.

• Provide a forum for information exchange and collaboration.

• Improve collaboration among the people involved in the grid research, grid deployment and
grid users.

• Create best practice guidelines from the experience of the technologies associated with GC.

• Educate on advances in the grid technologies and share experiences among the people of
interest.

22. What are the major works of GGF?

• Application and programming environments

• Data

• Architecture

• Information system and performance

• Peer to peer: desktop grids

• Scheduling and resource management

• Security

23. What are the three Grid Applications.

• Schedulers

• Resource Broker

• Load Balancing

(Reference not in syllabus)

Grid Applications
Based on our earlier discussion, we can align Grid Computing applications to
have common needs, such as what is described in (but not limited to) the following items:
Application partitioning that involves breaking the problem into discrete pieces Discovery and
scheduling of tasks and workflow

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 Data communications distributing the problem data where and when it is required

 Provisioning and distributing application codes to specific system nodes

 Results management assisting in the decision processes of the environment

 Autonomic features such as self-configuration, self-optimization, self-recovery, and self-

management

Let us now explore some of these Grid applications and their usage patterns. We start
with schedulers, which form the core component in most of the computational grids.

Schedulers

Schedulers are types of applications responsible for the management of jobs, such
as allocating resources needed for any specific job, partitioning of jobs to schedule parallel
execution of tasks, data management, event correlation, and service-level management
capabilities. These schedulers then form a hierarchical structure, with meta-schedulers that form
the root and other lower level schedulers, while providing specific scheduling capabilities that
form the leaves. These schedulers may be constructed with a local scheduler implementation
approach for specific job execution, or another meta-scheduler or a cluster scheduler for parallel
executions. Figure 1.2 shows this concept.

Figure 1.2. The scheduler hierarchy embodies local, meta-level,

and cluster schedulers.

The jobs submitted to Grid Computing schedulers are evaluated based on their
service-level requirements, and then allocated to the respective resources for execution. This
will involve complex workflow management and data movement activities to occur on a regular
basis. There are schedulers that must provide capabilities for areas such as (but not limited to):

Advanced resource reservation

 Service-level agreement validation and enforcement

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  Job and resource policy management and enforcement for best turnaround times within the
allowable budget constraints

 Monitoring job executions and status

 Rescheduling and corrective actions of partial failover situations

Resource Broker

The resource broker provides pairing services between the service requester and
the service provider. This pairing enables the selection of best available resources from the
service provider for the execution of a specific task. These resource brokers collect information
(e.g., resource availability, usage models, capabilities, and pricing information) from the
respective resources, and use this information source in the pairing process.

Figure 1.3 illustrates the use of a resource broker for purposes of this discussion. This
particular resource broker provides feedback to the users on the available resources. In general
cases, the resource broker may select the suitable scheduler for the resource execution task, and
collaborate with the scheduler to execute the task(s).

Figure 1.3. The resource broker collects information from the respective
resources, and utilizes this information source in the pairing process.

The pairing process in a resource broker involves allocation and support

functions such as:

 Allocating the appropriate resource or a combination of resources for the task execution

 Supporting users' deadline and budget constraints for scheduling optimizations

Load Balancing

The Grid Computing infrastructure load-balancing issues are concerned with the
traditional load-balancing distribution of workload among the resources in a Grid Computing
environment. This load-balancing feature must always be integrated into any system in order to
avoid processing delays and overcommitment of resources. These kinds of applications can be
built in connection with schedulers and resource managers.

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 The workload can be pushed outbound to the resources, based on the availability state
and/or resources, and can then pull the jobs from the schedulers depending on their availability.
This level of load balancing involves partitioning of jobs, identifying the resources, and
queueing of the jobs. There are cases when resource reservations might be required, as well as
running multiple jobs in parallel.

Another feature that might be of interest for load balancing is support for failure detection
and management. These load distributors can redistribute the jobs to other resources if needed.

Grid Portals

Grid portals are similar to Web portals, in the sense they provide uniform access to the grid
resources. For example, grid portals provide capabilities for Grid Computing resource
authentication, remote resource access, scheduling capabilities, and monitoring status
information. These kinds of portals help to alleviate the complexity of task management
through customizable and personalized graphical interfaces for the users. This, in turn,
alleviates the need for end users to have more domain knowledge than on the specific details of
grid resource management.

Some examples of these grid portal capabilities are noted in the following list:

Querying databases or LDAP servers for resource-specific information

File transfer facilities such as file upload, download, integration with custom software, and
so on Manage job through job status feedbacks

Allocate the resources for the execution of specific tasks

Security management

Provide personalized solutions

In short, these grid portals help free end users from the complexity of job management and
resource allocation so they can concentrate more on their domain of expertise. There are a
number of standards and software development toolkits available to develop custom portals.

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 The emerging Web services and Web service portal standards will play a more significant role
in portal development.

Integrated Solutions

Many of the global industry sectors have witnessed the emergence of a number of integrated
grid application solutions in the last few years. This book focuses on this success factor.

These integrated solutions are a combination of the existing advanced middleware and
application functionalities, combined to provide more coherent and high performance results
across the Grid Computing environment.

Integrated Grid Computing solutions will have more enhanced features to support more
complex utilization of grids such as coordinated and optimized resource sharing, enhanced
security management, cost optimizations, and areas yet to be explored. It is straightforward to
see that these integrated solutions in both the commercial and noncommercial worlds sustain
high values and significant cost reductions. Grid applications can achieve levels of flexibility
utilizing infrastructures.

24. What are the collective services available in grid computing?

• Discovery services

• Co allocation, scheduling, and brokering services

• Monitoring and diagnostic services

• Data replication services

• Grid-enabled programming systems

• Software discovery services

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