Mike Surridge

Experiences with GRIA — Industrial Applications on a Web Services Grid

The GRIA project set out to make the grid usable by industry. The GRIA middleware is based on Web services, and designed to meet the needs of industry for security and business-to-business (B2B) service procurement and operation. It provides well-defined B2B models for accounting and QoS agreement, and proxy-free delegation to support account management and service federation. The GRIA v3 software is now being used by industry. By taking a business-oriented approach independent of the evolving Open Grid Services Architecture proposals from the Global Grid Forum, GRIA has demonstrated the need for a wider understanding of virtual organizations (VOs). Traditional academic VOs are persistent, resourceful and have logically centralized, membership-oriented management structures. In contrast, the GRIA experience has been that business VOs are likely to be project-focused and have distributed process-oriented management structures

A business-oriented Cloud federation model for real-time applications

Cloud federation can allow individual Cloud providers working collaboratively to offer best-effort services to service customers. However, the current federated Cloud computing model is not appropriate for computationally intensive Real-time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA). This paper discusses how we propose and develop a business-oriented federated Cloud computing model where multiple independent infrastructure providers can cooperate seamlessly to provide scalable IT infrastructure and QoS-assured hosting services for ROIA. The distinct features of this proposed Cloud federation model is its business layer that can provide an enhanced security features and can trigger the on-demand resource provisioning across multiple infrastructure providers, hence helping to maximize the customer satisfaction, business benefits and resources usage.

OWL-WS: a workflow ontology for dynamic grid service composition

Semantic grid is becoming a key enabler for next generation grid and the need of supporting process description and enactment, by means of composition of multiple resources, emerged as one of the fundamental requirements. Within NextGRID project, the idea of adopting business processes (expressed as workflow policies) as architectural components in a next generation grid has been developed with the aim of providing architecture with dynamic behaviour and in teroperability. The need of a semantic workflow representation language then emerged and was developed defining an OWLS extension able to support workflow description. The resulting OWL-WS (OWL for workflow and services) ontology allows us modelling concept like abstract and concrete services and workflows according to a semantic workflow model also enabling specification of higher-order workflows and semantic service grouping. This language is being used for specifying adaptive business processes (policy) that are used as evaluation and binding mechanisms by a workflow enactment engine

Dynamic Service Provisioning Using GRIA SLAs

Service Level Agreements (SLA) include quality of service (QoS) constraints and bounds that have to be honoured by the service provider. To maximise the Service Provider revenue while satisfying the QoS requirements of the agreed SLAs it is important to be able to perform a dynamic distribution of the service provider resources between the services and SLAs. This distribution should be based on the current status and predicted evolution of the QoS characteristics. This paper describes the experiences managing SLA obligations from a service provider perspective in a scenario where dynamic deployment of services can be undertaken. The main issues faced to deal with the management of SLAs in this context are detailed. The adopted solution, based on GRIA (a Service Oriented Architecture framework) is discussed.

Dynamic trust federation in grids

Grids are becoming economically viable and productive tools. They provide a way of utilizing a vast array of linked resources such as computing systems, databases and services online within Virtual Organizations (VO). However, todays Grid architectures are not capable of supporting dynamic, agile federation across multiple administrative domains and the main barrier, which hinders dynamic federation over short time scales is security. Federating security and trust is one of the most significant architectural issues in Grids. Existing relevant standards and specifications can be used to federate security services, but do not directly address the dynamic extension of business trust relationships into the digital domain. In this paper we describe an experiment which highlights those challenging architectural issues and forms the basis of an approach that combines a dynamic trust federation and a dynamic authorization mechanism for addressing dynamic security trust federation in Grids. The experiment made with the prototype described in this paper is used in the NextGRID project to define the requirements of next generation Grid architectures adapted to business application needs.

Quality of Service Negotiation for Commercial Medical Grid Services

The GEMSS project has developed a service-oriented Grid that supports the provision of medical simulation services by service providers to clients such as hospitals. We outline the GEMSS architecture, legal framework and the security features that characterise the GEMSS infrastructure. High levels of quality of service are required and we describe a reservation-based approach to quality of service, employing a quality of service management system that iteratively finds suitable reservations and uses application specific performance models. The GEMSS Grid is a commercial environment so we support flexible pricing models and a FIPA reverse English auction protocol. Signed Web Service Level Agreement contracts are exchanged to commit parties to a quality of service agreement before job execution occurs. We run four experiments across European countries using high performance computing resources running advanced resource reservation schedulers. These experiments provide evidence for our Grid’s rational behaviour, both at the level of service provider quality of service management and at the higher level of the client choosing between competing service providers. The results lend support to our economic model and the technology we use for our medical application domain.

ECSES – examining crystal structures using `e-science': a demonstrator employing web and grid services to enhance user participation in crystallographic experiments

An application of e-science methodology and grid networking technology is presented that opens up new possibilities to enhance the operation of large high-throughput service-crystallography facilities, exemplified by the UK National Crystallography Service (NCS). A seamless distributed computing approach is used to provide remote secure visualization, monitoring and interaction with the laboratory and the diffraction experiment, supervision and input to the data workup and analysis processes, and to enable dissemination and further use of the resulting structural data. The architecture of the system is based on web and grid services (in particular the use of Globus, v1.1.4), which provide a secure environment for two-way information flow and communication between the service users and operators. This capability will enhance operations of instrument and software automation by providing more efficient use of the resources, increasing the throughput of samples and enabling interactions with distributed chemistry information databases, computational services and networks. The viability of these interactions is assessed and directions for future crystallography services suggested. The setup would be equally applicable to protein or powder crystallography services.

Predictive resource management for meta-applications

This paper defines meta-applications as large, related collections of computational tasks, designed to achieve a specific overall result, running on a (possibly geographically) distributed, non-dedicated meta-computing platform. To carry out such applications in an industrial context, one requires resource management and job scheduling facilities (including capacity planning), to ensure that the application is feasible using the available resources, that each component job will be sent to an appropriate resource, and that everything will finish before the computing resources are needed for other purposes.

Semantic web service interaction protocols: an ontological approach

A central requirement for achieving the vision of run-time discovery and dynamic composition of services is the provision of appropriate descriptions of the operation of a service, that is, how the service interacts with agents or other services. In this paper, we use experience gained through the development of real-life Grid applications to produce a set of requirements for such descriptions and then attempt to match those requirements against the offerings of existing work, such as OWL-S [1] and IRS-II [2]. Based on this analysis we identify which requirements are not addressed by current research and, in response, produce a model for describing the interaction protocol of a service in response. The main contributions of this model are the ability to describe the interactions of multiple parties with respect to a single service, distinguish between interactions initiated by the service itself and interactions that are initiated by clients or other cooperating services, and capture within the description service state changes relevant to interacting parties that are either a result of internal service events or interactions. The aim of the model is not to replace existing work, since it only focuses on the description of the interaction protocol of a service, but to inform the further development of such work.

Maintaining trustworthiness of socio-technical systems at run-time

Trustworthiness of dynamical and distributed socio-technical systems is a key factor for the success and wide adoption of these systems in digital businesses. Different trustworthiness attributes should be identified and accounted for when such systems are built, and in order to maintain their overall trustworthiness they should be monitored during run-time. Trustworthiness monitoring is a critical task which enables providers to significantly improve the systems’ overall acceptance. However, trustworthiness characteristics are poorly monitored, diagnosed and assessed by existing methods and technologies. In this paper, we address this problem and provide support for semi-automatic trustworthiness maintenance. We propose a trustworthiness maintenance framework for monitoring and managing the system’s trustworthiness properties in order to preserve the overall established trust during run-time. The framework provides an ontology for run-time trustworthiness maintenance, and respective business processes for identifying threats and enacting control decisions to mitigate these threats. We also present use cases and an architecture for developing trustworthiness maintenance systems that support system providers.