Open Grid Services Architecture

The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) describes an architecture for a service-oriented grid computing environment for business and scientific use, developed within the Global Grid Forum (GGF). OGSA is based on several other Web service technologies, notably WSDL and SOAP, but it aims to be largely agnostic in relation to the transport-level handling of data.

Briefly, OGSA is a distributed interaction and computing architecture based around services, assuring interoperability on heterogeneous systems so that different types of resources can communicate and share information. OGSA has been described as a refinement of the emerging Web Services architecture, specifically designed to support Grid requirements.^[1] OGSA has been adopted as a grid architecture by a number of grid projects including the Globus Alliance. Conceptually, OGSA was first suggested in a seminal paper by Ian Foster called "The Physiology of the Grid", and later developed by GGF working groups which resulted in a GGF information document, entitled The Open Grid Services Architecture, Version 1.5.^[2] The Global Grid Forum continues to track Tier 1 use case scenarios used in the definition of the OGSA core services.^[3]

Features

According to the OGSA Roadmap document, OGSA is:

• An architectural process in which the GGF's OGSA Working Group collects requirements and maintains a set of informational documents that describe the architecture;
• A set of normative specifications and profiles that document the precise requirements for a conforming hardware or software component;
• Software components that adhere to the OGSA specifications and profiles, enabling deployment of grid solutions that are interoperable even though they may be based on implementations from multiple sources.

The OGSA Architecture document describes an OGSA grid in terms of the following capabilities:

• Infrastructure services
• Execution Management services
• Data services
• Resource Management services
• Security services
• Self-management services
• Information services

As of late 2006^[update] an updated version of the OGSA Architecture document and several associated documents have been published, including the first of several planned normative documents, the OGSA WSRF Basic Profile, Version 1.0. Development of conformant software is expected to follow rapidly once a critical mass of normative documents have been published.

The concept of OGSA is derived from work presented in the paper "The Physiology of the Grid" by Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, Jeffrey M. Nick, and Steven Tuecke.

The Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) is related to OGSA, as it was originally intended to form the basic “plumbing” layer for OGSA. It has been superseded by WSRF and WS-Management.

References

1. ^ An Analysis of The Open Grid Services Architecture
2. ^ The Open Grid Services Architecture, Version 1.5
3. ^ OGSA Tier 1 Use Case Draft Document

External links

• OGSA Working Group home page
• Defining the Grid: A Roadmap for OGSA Standards v 1.0
• The Open Grid Services Architecture, Version 1.5
• Open Grid Services Architecture Glossary of Terms, Version 1.5
• OGSA WSRF Basic Profile, Version 1.0