United Kingdom of GridPP and NGS
Thu 30 Oct 2008
In Oxford last week the UK's leading Grid projects GridPP and the National Grid Service (NGS) met to discuss how to make the idea of a national Grid a reality. The meeting was designed to bring the two communities together to introduce the underlying technologies of each as well as the opportunities that are presented by a country-wide infrastructure.
The idea of a National Grid Initiative (NGI) to develop, maintain and provide an academic Grid has always been a plan both within GridPP and NGS. Although they have both taken slightly different paths to build their Grid, working together is not completely unknown, they already share expertise, ideas, computing resources and even occasionally staff. The idea of an NGI also builds into a proposed future international model where individual countries will be responsible for their input to a larger worldwide Grid with very little central administration similar to the system used by the Internet.
The one day meeting in Oxford was organised to allow the various technical elements of the projects to be presented side by side so that their differences and similarities could be more easily understood. This gave the staff from each side ample opportunity to understand how the other project has solved the same problem or provided a similar service. In some cases interoperability between solutions or services has been tackled, with Jens Jensen being able to talk about how the projects' storage solutions SRM and SRB can now work together. However a lot of the time the technology used by one project is slightly different to the other but seeing how the various areas are handled by each allows lessons to be learned when building a national architecture.
David Wallom, NGS technical director, was delighted with how the meeting went "Unification of grid infrastructures throughout the UK is essential as we move towards the provision of a single National Grid Infrastructure. By gathering at a technical level we have been able to start to discuss the essential operational considerations that must be made to make the systems work more closely together. This follows a rather intense period of affiliation of GridPP sites into the NGS which as already shown how close technically we are".
This is only one of the first steps towards a single UK-wide Grid infrastructure but it was a very important one and now a four man team of Pete Gronbech, Yves Coppens, Stephen Young and David Wallom will begin the road to a unified infrastructure. Thier first task will be to document the exact differences in the NGS and GridPP approaches and then to look at what exactly from the middleware stack used by GridPP is required to run jobs from this system on the NGS core sites.
The slides and notes from the meeting can be found here:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=42642
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