16:32:27 RRSAgent has joined #tagmem 16:32:27 logging to http://www.w3.org/2005/09/13-tagmem-irc 16:32:32 zakim, this will be tag 16:32:32 ok, Norm; I see TAG_Weekly()12:30PM scheduled to start 2 minutes ago 16:32:51 Norm has changed the topic to: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2005/09/13-agenda.html 16:32:57 Norm has changed the topic to: TAG: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2005/09/13-agenda.html 16:34:22 Meeting: W3C TAG telcon 16:34:27 Chair: VC 16:34:32 Scribe: NW 16:34:37 ScribeNick: Norm 16:35:09 Date: 13 Sep 2005 16:35:49 Regrets: TimBL, HT, NM 16:52:22 norm, I'm curious how you sync your sidekick with the rest of the web these days. I switched from N3 rules to XSLT and hcard/hcalendar 16:53:50 It's only one-way :-( so I just grab the data, write it out as XML (not RDF), and massage it into shape. I have some special purpose readers that interpret n3-like comments and some microformated fields (like BDL-RDU/AA 123) 16:54:34 mine is mostly one way... I can add calendar entries with hipAgent.py ... 16:54:51 Yes, you pointed me to that code, but I haven't integrated it yet. 16:55:08 I'd like to stop retyping travel itinerary appointments though :-) 16:57:27 Vincent has joined #tagmem 16:58:44 brb 17:00:48 Ed has joined #tagmem 17:01:17 TAG_Weekly()12:30PM has now started 17:01:24 +??P3 17:01:28 + +1.650.786.aaaa 17:01:31 -??P3 17:01:32 +??P3 17:02:04 +[INRIA] 17:02:44 +Norm 17:02:49 zakim, who's on the phone? 17:02:49 On the phone I see ??P3, +1.650.786.aaaa, [INRIA], Norm 17:03:08 zakim, aaaa is PaulStrong 17:03:10 +PaulStrong; got it 17:03:26 zakim, ??P3 is Ed 17:03:26 +Ed; got it 17:03:35 zakim, [INRIA is Vincent 17:03:35 +Vincent; got it 17:03:40 zakim, who's on the phone? 17:03:40 On the phone I see Ed, PaulStrong, Vincent, Norm 17:04:16 +DanC 17:04:19 Partial regrets: Roy 17:04:38 zakim, who's here? 17:04:38 On the phone I see Ed, PaulStrong, Vincent, Norm, DanC 17:04:39 On IRC I see Ed, Vincent, RRSAgent, Zakim, Norm, DanC 17:05:01 Agenda: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2005/09/13-agenda.html 17:05:12 Topic: Administrivia 17:05:45 Most of today is for GRID discussions 17:05:59 Accept minutes of last telcon: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2005/09/06-minutes.html 17:06:18 Accepted. 17:06:22 (they still say "DRAFT". ah.) 17:06:31 Topic: Discussion of GRID 17:06:38 Thanks to Paul Strong for joining us 17:06:53 This is an informal discussion of GRID and it's connection to the Web 17:08:50 Paul: Paul Strong is a Systems Architect at Sun. Works in the N1 product group. N1 is a suite of products that leverage the GRID 17:09:08 ...Grid is a somewhat ambiguous term being widely used by vendors 17:09:31 ...Within N1, I've been working on products for about five years. Mostly working on data center and enterprise applications 17:10:16 ...Recommends July issue of ACM [scribe missed] 17:10:57 ...GRID is a view of the networking infrastructure 17:11:15 ...It's a view of computing resources that are pervasive. It's more about the platform than the end-user applicatoins 17:11:28 (hm... http://www.sun.com/software/gridware/index.xml Sun N1 Grid Engine 6 ... seems to be a hunk of hardware. I thought maybe N1 was a service.) 17:12:07 ...GRID really is about recognizing two trends: growth in network bandwidth, and network distributed services 17:12:36 Paul: GRID platform offers scalability, redundancy, ... 17:13:36 Paul: Needs services for distributing and managing work loads 17:13:54 ...Analagous to an electrical grid, in the sense that it's pervasive and more-or-less uniform 17:14:01 (hmm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing "The SETI@home project, launched in 1999, is a widely-known example of a simple grid computing project." ) 17:14:11 +DOrchard 17:14:34 DanC: Sun N1 Grid seems to be a hunk of hardware... 17:14:41 dorchard has joined #tagmem 17:14:46 Paul: The N1 products are a mixture of both hardware and services 17:15:09 Paul: Software is a meta-operating environment. Those products are called N1 17:15:42 ...They're closely tied to a set of hardware to run them on at Sun. The result is an integrated set of components. You no longer care about individual servers or OS instances. 17:15:55 DanC: So if I buy a chunk of N1, do I get CPU hours or a box? 17:16:23 Paul: It depends what you want, you can buy time on our GRID, or buy hardware and setup your own 17:16:56 Paul: An example of a GRID application is SETI@Home 17:17:17 ...The use of the term GRID was prevelant initially in scientific and academic community. 17:17:28 ...In the commercial space, rendering and simulation applications 17:17:49 ...The software that allows that workload to be distributed/managed/aggregated is the middleware, integration layer that is the meta-operating environment 17:18:26 DanC: Is it a style of computing, or is it technical standards that you could interoperate with? 17:18:30 Paul: It's some of both 17:18:49 DanC: Does SETI@Home conform? 17:18:56 Paul: No, it predates them. The context is still being refined. 17:19:11 Paul: There are a couple of consortia working on this: The Global Grid Forum 17:19:28 ...There's The Enterprise GRID Alliance, focused on driving GRID adoption within enterprises 17:19:45 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing doesn't seem to mention The Enterprise GRID Alliance ) 17:19:52 Paul: To get the GRID used in less compute-intensive environments 17:20:08 -> http://www.gridalliance.org/ Enterprise GRID Alliance 17:20:49 Paul: discusses benefits of GRID: ability to manage pools of resources; a mutable, dynamic space 17:21:43 Paul: reiterates the goal of treating these things holistically... 17:22:18 (EJB and J2... missed. hmm... I was starting to understand...) 17:22:20 Paul: workload management, mechanisms for monitoring, managing, controlling processes 17:23:02 Paul: Users need to be able to combine a heterogenous set of products and services together 17:23:17 Paul: Standards are needed to allow each of these components to be managed. 17:24:18 Paul: The term GRID has become very loaded. 17:25:24 [scribe lost thread] 17:25:55 There's lots of marketing in this space: managing complexity, providing agility, etc. 17:26:21 Paul: They're very similar, but they aren't identical. The GRID space is very confusing for many of the end-users and consumers. 17:26:45 Ed: GRID is a very broad term. Everything from SETI@Home to shared system resource pools that's more of a realtime virtual machine type of thing 17:26:48 Paul: Yes, absolutely. 17:27:01 Paul: One of the difficulties we have as an industry is articulating this 17:27:43 ...It's going to take a long time to get to the end. 17:28:36 Paul: A lot of the technologies we think about today in the GRID space that do the mapping of workload onto resources 17:29:08 Paul: There are also provisioning services 17:29:43 Paul: What we're automating today is the provisioning processes, but that's just the beginning. 17:29:48 DanC: How is provisioning expensive? 17:30:10 Paul: Consider an electronic book store that has a web tier, a web service tier(?), and a database server tier 17:30:33 Paul: There's a set of database servers running on particular Sun hardware with a particular OS 17:30:59 Paul: The services layer might be BEA running on some particular Dell hardware 17:30:59 ...Right now there isn't a standardized way to describe all these components 17:31:18 ...Not only are the components complex, but there's a relationship with every other component already in the data center 17:31:35 ...Today, people manage individual resources 17:31:41 ...But those are increasing exponentially 17:31:56 ...Because they don't trust management tools, each server is typically dedicated to a single function 17:32:11 ...This leads to silos of services that perform single tasks 17:32:20 ...This leads to waste and lack of agility 17:32:30 ...It's very hard to track relationships between all the components 17:32:48 DanC: Are there any GRID computing saves the day stories? 17:32:57 Paul: There are stories that it's leading that way 17:33:34 ...A lot of stuff is relatively static today. We have a tool that allows you to provision complete projects, like the bookstore 17:33:42 ...It does all the work 17:34:06 ...It typically pays for itself in six to twelve months. There are fewer unplanned outages because planned downtime is all automated 17:34:18 ...It's more deterministic in production and is more reliable. 17:34:40 Paul: The developers can create the model when they create the application. For provisioning the test and QA engineers can test with a single button. 17:35:00 DanC: It has a little blinking light that says "you need a new database server" 17:35:06 ? 17:35:08 Paul: Yep. 17:35:30 ...something about ad hoc construction that seems at odds with the previous story... 17:35:52 Paul: When load gets high, the provisioning application will attempt to reconfigur (scribe ?) 17:36:31 Paul: Getting to the point where it all "just works" is going to take a long time. It's very easy to solve problems with regards to concrete things, but it's far more complicated when you're trying to model more abstract components (a server vs. a tier of servers) 17:37:24 DanC: It's all proprietary hings cobbled together, but Sun does have products in this space? 17:37:38 Paul: Yes. It's mapping workload onto resources with respect to policy. 17:38:17 HP and IBM do as well. Unfortunatly, they dont work together to create one grid, each has its own grid. 17:38:18 Paul: In the GRID world, we're talking about mapping services (a bookstore, SETI@home, etc.) onto a network of resources (servers, firewalls, etc.) with respect to policies 17:38:35 (btw, norm, re partitioning your ubuntu box, I highly recommend LVM) 17:38:38 Paul: The first things that get automated are the simple mechanisms. 17:39:10 Paul: There will eventually be a move towards automating higher order problems, such as managing performance and availability. 17:39:35 Paul: Today there are no single products that let you do all of those things 17:39:56 ...Instead you get different products to manage different aspects of that. You get something that is more automated, but still has lots of human interaction 17:40:19 Paul: Sun has products that fit into a number of those spaces, but none are integrated togeher as a whole meta-operating system. No one's products are. 17:41:26 Vincent: What are the consortia doing today, what are the main standards under development? 17:41:49 Paul: Several things are needed 17:42:09 ...A way of describing the requirements of the system 17:42:39 The Enterprise Grid Alliance is working on this sort of thing 17:42:43 q+ to ask if these enterprise grids have peers grids 17:42:46 Paul: And use cases based on that description 17:43:52 Paul: We're working on a standard set of requirements that we can give to other standards organizations 17:44:05 Paul: The Global Grid Forum is working on standards farther downstream 17:44:20 ...A service-centric architectural view; the OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture) 17:45:03 Paul: Because GRID was originally driven by compute-intensive applications, they have a lot of those, but they're working on getting more broad 17:45:27 Paul: A job control language is one example. How do I describe a work load, schedule it, monitor it, etc. 17:45:59 Paul: As you approach the more concrete things, you want to standarize them too. That's where interactin with DNTF occurs. 17:46:11 DMTF = Distributed Management Task Force (www.dmtf.org) 17:46:14 s/DNTF/DMTF/ 17:46:22 They own the SIM standard (Standard Information Model) 17:47:17 There's work to make some of these things more abstract as well (pools of servers instead of single servers) 17:47:29 Paul: There are OASIS GRID/WS standards under development as well 17:47:59 Paul: You can look at GRID as the platform that is the network that is the web 17:48:17 Paul: There are other standards in this space too (for storage, for example) 17:48:42 ack danc 17:48:42 DanC, you wanted to ask if these enterprise grids have peers grids 17:48:54 DanC: Are enterprise grids mostly their own world, or do they have peers? 17:49:01 DanC: Does my grid talk to other grids? 17:49:34 Paul: We define an enterprise grid as the set of components (from disks to CRM applications) managed by a single enterprise 17:49:48 Paul: But each may have several data centers 17:50:17 Paul: In some sense, they're isolated in terms of management, but they do interact with the Web. 17:50:41 Paul: And one enterprise grid could interact with another (the bookstore grid interacting with the credit card company grid) 17:50:59 DanC: How will these two talk to each other? 17:51:19 Paul: The expectation is that we'd be using standard mechanisms for interaction 17:51:40 Paul: But I as the bookstore owner may have expections about the speed of service from the credit card company 17:51:52 ...I may want to negotiate that quality of service. 17:51:59 ...Possibly on a per-transaction basis. 17:52:27 If my customer is a real brick-and-mortar store ordering thousands of books, I may want a faster answer than for Joe Individual User. 17:53:18 Paul: We chose to bound the problem at a single enterprise because it makes authority and control simpler 17:53:38 Paul: When you're working across enterprises, then you have federation rather than hierarchy 17:54:25 Paul: GGF views its charter as everything grid, they see what EGA does as (an important) subset 17:54:55 Paul: They care about viewing the internet as a set of computers controlled by different organizations but on which I could impose a virtual organization 17:55:09 q+ to ask about job migration between, say, sun's and IBM's grid services 17:55:28 Paul: For example, automobile design is sometimes shared across companies because it's so expensive 17:55:52 Paul: From the GGF perspective, a virtual GRID could be constructed between these companies 17:56:14 Paul: Typically, the shared resources are segregated from the companies own resources 17:56:17 q? 17:57:42 Ed: It seems like because the GRID is undefined, a lot of work is hindered. If it's more along the lines of a distributed computing environment, then I can see where that comes into play. Is there progress on defining either striations or a clear definition of what GRID is? 17:57:51 Paul: In terms of the word GRID, no 17:58:44 Paul: We're working on this to some sense in EGA by working on requirements. By being able to clearly enumerate and describe problems, we can guide GGF to work on a particular area. 17:59:31 Paul: A big challenge is identifying the set of problems that people care about most and the boundry between the components we care about. 18:00:05 Paul describes a number of things that can be virtualized 18:00:26 Paul: Having a model for these components and the life cycle of those components is critical for the standards bodies to be able to do stuff that isn't unintentionally competative 18:01:05 Ed: Right, and I guess that's why I think breaking the big problem down into smaller problems seems like something you'd want to do 18:01:38 Paul: GGF is more of a boil the ocean perspective, EGA is about boiling enough water to make a cup of tea 18:02:05 Paul: There is a working group called the SCRUM (scribe wonders about spelling) in GGF that's trying to look at these issues 18:02:56 ack danc 18:02:56 DanC, you wanted to ask about job migration between, say, sun's and IBM's grid services 18:03:21 DanC: If Amazon rented time on the Sun N1 thingy and some IBM On Demand computing, is it feasible to migrate jobs across those? 18:03:29 Paul: It totally depends. 18:03:47 Paul: There are certain clasess of workflow where you can migrate the work today. In a batchable system, you could move them around in stages. 18:04:21 Paul: Rendering would be a good example. I've got 20,000 jobs, I can send 10,000 to each. 3,000 fail on one system so I can migrate them to the other. 18:05:09 Paul: If you have shared infrastructure, you can migrate between transactions 18:05:24 DanC: Across the Sun/IBM boundary? 18:05:40 Paul: Technically, yes. 18:06:08 Paul: Right now a lot of this is really proprietary. It'll become easier after the standards are written. 18:07:28 Paul: People are mainly looking at whole data centers or whole enterprises at the moment. 18:08:28 Vincent: Is there naything important that you feel wasn't addressed? 18:08:28 Paul: I'm not really sure. 18:08:52 Paul recommends ACMQ Magazine again 18:11:09 -PaulStrong 18:11:14 Most of the articles will be online soon. 18:11:14 http://www.acmqueue.org/ 18:11:14 s/ACMQ/ACM Queue/ 18:11:17 TAG thanks Paul for a great overview. 18:11:21 Vincent: Thanks also to Norm for organizing Sun's participation 18:11:27 Norm: Thanks again, Paul 18:11:29 Topic: Edinburgh Face-to-Face 18:11:47 Draft agenda: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2005/09/20-agenda.html 18:12:07 q+ to ask for abstractComponentRefs-37 on the ftf agenda, maybe 18:12:12 Vincent: Some time for issue status, then time for four or five issues to discuss. 18:12:21 Vincent: Return to the discussion of new directions. 18:13:18 ack danc 18:13:18 DanC, you wanted to ask for abstractComponentRefs-37 on the ftf agenda, maybe 18:13:47 DanC feels more prepared to talk about abstractComponentRefs-37 18:14:29 Vincent: Try to review this over the next day or so and send feedback so it can be updated before the f2f. 18:14:36 Vincent: Any other business? 18:16:45 -DOrchard 18:16:45 Next meeting is the f2f on 20 Sep in Edinburgh 18:16:52 -DanC 18:16:56 -Norm 18:16:57 Adjourned 18:16:58 -Ed 18:16:58 -Vincent 18:16:59 zakim, bye 18:16:59 Zakim has left #tagmem 18:17:00 TAG_Weekly()12:30PM has ended 18:17:02 Attendees were +1.650.786.aaaa, [INRIA], Norm, PaulStrong, Ed, Vincent, DanC, DOrchard 18:35:40 RRSAgent, make logs world-access 18:35:47 RRSAgent, pointer? 18:35:47 See http://www.w3.org/2005/09/13-tagmem-irc#T18-35-47 18:43:13 rrsagent, bye 18:43:13 I see no action items