Image Courtesy Matteo Melani

"These 'blueprint' meetings are held periodically to focus our understanding of particular areas of grid computing, and to extract basic design principles for the OSG," said meeting chair Dane Skow. "At this meeting we discussed the current state of MIS and plans for the future."

Unlike most areas of grid computing, there are many implementations of MIS growing out of operations, resource selection, accounting and project-specific efforts. Understanding the reasons behind these different implementations and agreeing on basic requirements and goals were the objectives of the blueprint meeting. Participants identified several different characteristics vital for effective MIS and reached agreement on some basic principles of the MIS architectural design, such as the need for a standardized interface to pass data collected from the network of sensors to the data presentation layer.

Image Courtesy Mark Green "The requirements and principles defined have clarified our mission," said Mark Green from the University at Buffalo, co-chair of the OSG MIS Technical Group. "We also recognized a large degree of commonality between different implementations, and leaders of related activities strengthened collaborations and commitments toward interoperability during the meeting." The second day's discussions were aimed at refining goals for the next OSG software release, targeted for the end of this year. One feature of the next release discussed was the introduction and wider use of Web Services and the implications for MIS. "These face-to-face focused discussions really help in moving the OSG forward," said Fermilab's Ruth Pordes. "While traveling takes a lot out of all of us, the extra time to talk and think makes a big difference. This week's OSG Storage Day is another such opportunity to talk about one specific part of our roadmap in more detail." Learn more at the OSG Web site. —Dane Skow, Fermilab e-mail this article