Thebes

So, Tim Bornholtz is posting his most recent additions to the service interface and client user interface projects this week. In his service interface, he has managed to implement nearly the entire DRMAA specification to JSDL, allowing JSDL messages to arrive, be parsed to DRMAA, and executed. For now, he has built against Sun Grid Engine, but migrating to Condor, PBS, or Platform LSF should be a matter of building against the different libraries. Additionally, he has adapted Virginia Tech's interesting JSDL generator to become the core of a job submission tool.

So, for now, a user can create a job and submit it to a known compute service.

We're beginning a highly rudimentary start to a security token service. This means we're building something that can accept a username and password and return SAML. This is using web services instead of the web user mechanisms of Shibboleth. Eventually it would be nice to add SAML to SAML, and anything to Kerberos, etc, but username to SAML is what we need today.

We met with the PVFS folks at Clemson. Fascinating stuff coming down the road, and an excellent fit with our interest in SAML. We're looking at not only doing the authorization by filtering from our SAML assertion, but now it could be possible to populate file metadata from the same assertion. This is powerful stuff, not just in HPC and Grid, but in enterprise file systems and preservation and archiving data. A real break from the UNIX file system in form and function.

It is almost time to start looking at resource descriptions and resource discovery. Well, it's already past time, but we don't have the volunteers. GLUE2? Extensions of JSDL? Something else? Tim has posted a schema based upon JSDL. So far no comments. One thing is clear, monolithic resource indexing is a non-starter, we need something with a peer-to-peer and hierarchical architecture. Of course, once this is built, it can also be used well outside the HPC/grid arena. This sort of architecture can answer any version of "who is publishing foo for me to see?"

Finally, SWITCH is publishing some interesting work in policy administration, generation, and enforcement. This is going to be nice, their approach will allow for plugging directly into our service interface.

If any of this strikes your fancy, contact me. We need good volunteers (or money to hire good coders). Or good ideas. Or even bad ideas we can argue about.

Arnie Miles