[seek-dev] Re: EcoGrid

[Matt Jones]

Hi Raja,

Thanks for the note.  I more or less agree with your assessment. 
Unfortunately, I haven't tracked the progress to date very effectively, 
so I'm not sure if we're ready to package stuff up.  I think we should 
have another conference call to firm up the progress and decide on a 
release date and its contents.  The call should include you, me, jing, 
bing, dave, and rod at a minimum.  I propose
    Thursday January 15th at 1pm PST
for a conference call.  Can everyone do it at 1pm PST?  Please let me 
know if you can not.  When we finalize the time, I'll send out 
conference call information to everyone.

Some additional notes below...

Arcot Rajasekar wrote:
> 
> Hi Matt
> 	Bertram, Bing and I had a long conversation about what is done and
> what is needed in the next phase of the project.  I looked at what we had
> laid out in our Seattle meeting and later confirmed at the  Santa Barbara
> meeting. I think we should package the Ecogrid up and
> provide it with an easy use client sp that our SEEK scientists canm start
> playing with it and give feedback to this.
> I suggest that we quickly make the following available:
>     1. Server
> 	Metacat wrapper  (Jing)
> 	SRB Wrapper   (Bing)
> 	Digir wrapper (?)
>         Xanthoria wrapper (?)
Maybe we can get DiGIR out, but I doubt Xanthoria at this point.  I 
think Rod has been struggling with getting the basic GT3 setup in place, 
which indicates to me that GT3 will likely have some serious deployment 
issues.  But no harm in our releasing what we have working in 
Metacat/SRB as an alpha of some sort.

> 
>      providing the following functionalities:
> 	query
> 	get
> 	put

We haven't implemented "put" AFAIK, unless we got it for free by 
switching to using GridFTP.

>    2. set up a SEEK registry (already done by Matt)

Actually, not complete.  I figured out that we could use the globus 
tools here, but we still have some work to define the metadata for 
services that will be registered, install a production GT3 instance to 
act as a registry node, and write up documentation about how to do it 
(register a node).

>    3. get a client package
>          for java based developer users
>          for web-based users with a simple interface into SEEK ecogrid.

Agreed.  Jing has a initial client available.  We can and should package 
this as a library for distribution and make a web interface.  But...we 
need to do a code review to make sure it is designed properly.  At this 
point there has been very little design going into the code that's been 
written, so its all rather ad-hoc.  This is mostly because we've been 
experimenting with GT3 which has been troublesome at the least.

I also think we should make it a high priority to make Kepler 
communicate over the EcoGrid to retrieve data.  This has been the 
limiting factor to demonstrating many of the Kepler tools.  I am hoping 
Jing can incorporate his current client in Kepler by the BEAM meeting in 
ABQ coming up in a few weeks.

> 
> This will give the portal into SEEK with some EcoGrid funbctionality which
>     we can add more functionality through WSDL for AMS/SMS and such

Agreed.  One other major component needs to be finalized before we can 
proceed: a production CA and a testing framework.

We decided on an architecture for it at the last meeting, but haven't 
made any real progress towards setting that up.  Until this is set up, 
we won't be able to share data at all unless we decide to only expose 
anonymously accessible data over EcoGrid for now.

In Santa Barbara we agreed we needed a testing framework to use to test 
various EcoGrid implementations.  Rod agreed to code this, probably in 
JUnit, but I haven't heard anything from him.  This would allow us to 
insert some standard data in a EcoGrid node, query it, and retrieve it, 
making sure we're getting the exact same behavior from Metacat, SRB and 
other EcoGrid wrapped services.  I think we need some progress on this 
before we can release in good conscience.

> Once this is done, we can redirect the EcoGrid team to AMS work until we
> have gathered more user input  at which time we can proceed to
> level2 and level3 or EcoGrid implementation

OK.  I think some of the other EcoGrid interfaces are important, such as 
aggregation nodes, but we can discuss that relative to other priorities 
during the conf call.

Matt

> 
> What do you think?
> 
> 	thanks
> 		raja
> 
> 

-- 
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Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California Santa Barbara
Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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