[seek-dev] Re: EcoGrid

[Jing Tao]

Hi, Matt:

It would be good that we have a conference call to discuss Ecogrid. I can 
make it on Jan 15th, 1pm PST.

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Matt Jones wrote:

> 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.


MetaCat ecogrid server is up for "query" and "get" function. It is running 
in both dev and pine.


> >    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.

I create a ecogird query client class. It has those public APIs:
EcogridQueryClient()
createServiceInstance()
destroyServiceInstance()
createUserProxy()
createEcoGridQueryLevelOnePortType()
query()
get()

I also put the client.jar, stub.jar and other necessery jar files into a 
zip file- ecogrid_client_lib.zip. If we unzip this file, we will get a dir 
name ecogrid_client_lib. After we put every jar file of this dir into 
class path, the client should work.

But things is not so easy :) We decided use GridFtp to handle get() 
method and GridFtp need credential. So we need setup grid security in the 
client. Such as host's certificate, key, user's certificate, key. Also, we 
need to install GridFtp in client machine. I create a zip file to help 
person to install it. So it is hard to create a thin client. 

Another issue is gt3 itself. It is not very robust(probably, my code 
is not robust too :)) When I run the client code, sometimes it 
works fine. Sometimes gave some exception even i didn't change any thing. 
I will continue to digging it out.

I will try my best to make Kepler communicate over the EcoGrid to retrieve 
data. But I am not sure if I can finished it before the BEAM meeting 
beause I don't know too much about Kepler and our ecogrid client is 
fragile.

Thanks.

Jing


-- 
Jing Tao
National Center for Ecological
Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
735 State St. Suite 204
Santa Barbara, CA 93101