[gfs-wg] Re: GGF/OGSA standards for hierarchical namespaces
Gregory Newby
newby at arsc.edu
Fri Mar 31 13:50:40 CST 2006
It's not too late to schedule time at GGF17 for a cross-group
meeting. (Well, it's a little too late...but not completely
unreasonable to attempt.)
-- Greg
On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 11:17:54AM -0800, Allen Luniewski wrote:
> Chris,
>
> Thanks for the very thoughtful note! A few comments.
>
> I agree with you that the current situation is, to put it mildly, not
> acceptable. We need to move to a position where the community agrees on a
> single means for creating a hierarchy of pointers to resources (a
> directory structure in Unix-speak). Clearly one aspect of this is that
> RNS and WS-Directory need to reconciled into a single proposal. Resolution
> sooner rather than later is clearly in the best interests of the various
> WGs who depend upon directories (including OGSA Data which I share
> responsibility for).
>
> You mention a couple of specific technical issues. A few comments on
> those:
> 1. I go back and forth on attributes in the directory system.
> Since these are almost certainly cached from the resources, today I am
> inclined to say that
> attributes should not be part of the directory system. Ask
> me tomorrow, and I may have the other answer :-) But today, I would leave
> them out
> of the base specification for simplicity but consider an
> extension that included attributes if that were felt to be vital.
> 2. Dave Berry's suggestion to separate out the iterator component
> is a good one. There are going to be many places in the overall grid
> standards
> effort where an iterator-like structure will be needed.
> Standardizing this seems like a proper goal for GGF. If that is accepted
> then using it
> in a directory service seems quite natural.
>
> As for moving forward, I think that we need to see how this thread plays
> out. My instincts, however, are that getting the interested parties in a
> room for a few hours would be the most effective way to drive this to an
> early resolution.
>
> Allen Luniewski
> IBM Information Management Division
> San Jose, California
>
>
>
>
> Christopher Jordan <ctjordan at sdsc.edu>
> 03/27/2006 05:28 PM
>
> To
> Osamu Tatebe <o.tatebe at aist.go.jp>
> cc
> Arun Jagatheesan <arun at sdsc.edu>, Manuel Pereira
> <mpereira at almaden.ibm.com>, Andrew Grimshaw <grimshaw at cs.virginia.edu>,
> Mark Morgan <mmm2a at virginia.edu>, Dave Berry <daveb at nesc.ac.uk>, Allen
> Luniewski <luniew at almaden.ibm.com>, Christopher Jordan
> <ctjordan at sdsc.edu>, Hiro Kishimoto <hiro.kishimoto at jp.fujitsu.com>, Ian
> Foster <foster at mcs.anl.gov>, Gregory Newby <newby at arsc.edu>,
> gfs-wg at ggf.org, ogsa-naming-wg at ggf.org
> Subject
> GGF/OGSA standards for hierarchical namespaces
>
>
>
>
>
>
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> All,
>
> Forgive the wide distribution on this e-mail, but this issue seems to
> be to be both extraordinarily important to the future of GGF/OGSA
> standards efforts and also in a state of either limbo or paralysis.
> The topic I'm addressing here, both in my capacity as the secretary
> of GFS-WG and as a generally interested participant on a few
> different GGF working groups, is the question of adopting a single,
> possibly minimal, standard for creating hierarchically organized
> collections of pointers (WS-Names? GSR/GSHs, to date myself?) to
> "resources", where the term "resource" could denote a service
> providing access to a collection of files, computational resources,
> or database records (that's a non-exclusive list), and where some
> items in the hierarchy could actually represent directory-like
> structures, i.e. containers for other collections of resources.
>
> The way I got involved in this discussion through the Grid File
> Systems-WG, which at the time was bringing the RNS specification
> forward for final approval as a GFD. Subsequently, there have been
> numerous discussions outside of the GFS-WG context about the
> suitability of the RNS standard for more general applications, as
> well as the (perceived) complexity of the standard as a barrier to
> entry. There have also been alternative directory construction
> standards proposed by members of the OGSA-Naming-WG.
>
> The following are the activities/proposals I know of:
>
> RNS: I know the GGF editors have returned the final(?) RNS draft to
> GFS-WG, with the suggestion that it is too specific to filesystem
> needs, and the suggestion that it either be limited in scope to GFS
> applications only (a non-optimal solution for obvious reasons) or
> that the authors work with the OGSA-Naming people to help develop a
> universal standard for hierarchical resource namespaces. If we are to
> move forward with RNS, one of these options will clearly be a
> necessity, given the points Greg Newby made in his responses on
> behalf of the GFSG.
>
> WS-Directory: This is the hierarchical namespace standard developed
> at UVa in response to their difficulty in implementing the
> complexities and ambiguities in RNS. I like the simplicity of WS-
> Directory, however it seems to be missing significant requirements
> for general use such as attributes, both attributed which should be
> required such as time-to-live, and the ability to add extensibility
> attributes such as resource type, QoS, etc. This ability to add
> arbitrary attributes is present in RNS but it still lacks some
> obviously fundamental required attributes.
>
> Finally, Dave Berry sent an e-mail immediately after GGF16 in which
> he mentioned the suggestion that we separate this functionality into
> two logical functions, and therefore standards - a Directory
> Interface and an Iterator interface, in which Directory interfaces
> were essentially just pointers to Iterators, which would be
> standardized. However, there would be no restriction that a Directory
> point to a particular type of iterator interface. One point I wasn't
> clear on from the e-mail was whether an entry in an interator could
> be another directory, although I suspect it can.
>
> This short list is what I've got within easy reach. As I said
> previously, I believe this is an important issue to resolve quickly,
> and I'm sending this note in the hopes of initiating the conversation
> among as many of the relevant parties as I can. Please feel free to
> forward at will, respond with agreement, anger, or even unconcealed
> rage.
>
> Possible ways forward would be for us to have a conference call (GFS-
> WG meets rarely, and we could quite easily give up our call for a
> more focused discussion of these issues), an extended e-mail
> discussion, or a meeting at the next GGF (assuming we get a chance).
>
> Let me know how you feel about the options presented above, or feel
> free to propose new ones if you like. The important thing is that we
> begin to gain momentum, and then keep it going forward.
>
> Thanks.
>
> N.B. For anyone who may have missed any of the discussions reference
> above, please let me know and I'll be happy to forward them to you
> from my archives.
>
> - ----------------------------------------------------
> Chris Jordan
> HPC Systems Engineer
> High End Computing Systems Group
> San Diego Supercomputer Center
> ctjordan at sdsc.edu
> 858.534.8347
>
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Dr. Gregory Newby, Chief Scientist (Acting), Arctic Region Supercomputing Ctr
Univ of Alaska Fairbanks-909 Koyukuk Dr-PO Box 756020-Fairbanks-AK 99775-6020
e: newby AT arsc.edu v: 907-450-8663 f: 907-450-8603 w: www.arsc.edu/~newby
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