GRIA 5 Release Notes

GRIA is the first Grid middleware designed specifically to support Grid-based business usage across organisational boundaries. GRIA has its origins in an EC collaborative project of the same name, whose goal was to figure out how the Grid could be used to support high-powered computations, but in a business context. Business requires an infrastructure that can unite customers and suppliers with commercial strength security, explicit trust and value exchange points. The infrastructure must be cost effective to operate and manual authorisation and administration decisions need to be minimised. Operational constraints are assumed such as firewalls, network bandwidth limitations and security policy compliance.

GRIA 5 provides several software packages that can be downloaded free of charge, each designed to address a particular business need:

• a basic application services package that allows an organisation with cluster computing facilities to provide data storage and processing (using applications installed on the cluster) for trusted users;
• service provider management package, that adds support for service level agreements to manage and if necessary bill for service usage, via a simple management protocol that can be used with other (non-GRIA) application services, if required
• client package that allows users to access GRIA application services via simple desktop applications, including negotiating with service management facilities (if present), and provides a simple application programming interface (API) for development of integrated applications that use such services, if required
• a client management package, that adds support for organisation-level management of service users, including authorised sign-off for service level agreements including billing terms, and centralised control and monitoring of which users can procure and access services.

GRIA 5 enhances GRIA 4.x by providing a modular and flexible management infrastructure. The accounting model has been extended to allow clients to locally manage users within their organisation that can access service provider accounts and service level agreements removing the requirement to replicate access control lists at each service provider. The fixed term QoS service has been replaced by an SLA Management service that can be configured to monitor, constrain and bill for usage metrics defined by the service provider depending upon the business needs. For example, a data provider may have metrics for transfer, storage or subscription to a specific data set, whereas a application service provider may have metrics for CPU time and concurrent application licenses. SLA's allow customers and service providers to negotiate commitments with softer constraints on resources and time periods, so users can give realistic estimates of their needs, and don't lose everything if their needs overrun. The GRIA services have been decoupled allowing IT vendors to integrate GRIA management capabilities with their applications to support inter-domain collaboration using a well-defined standards-based API. Key web service and Grid standards have been adopted including WS-I Basic Profile, WS-I Basic Security Profile, secure WS-Addressing, a basic WSRF profile, WS-Federation and WS-Notification. Even with all this additional functionality, GRIA 5 still retains the market leading portability and usability features of GRIA 4. Service providers can be up and running in hours on a variety of operating systems whilst clients can be accessing services in a matter of minutes.