Hi,
Yes, we have a team led by U. Chicago that is integrating a new set of
open source tools for this purpose. Unlike the original MDS
development effort, which was aimed at providing monitoring
middleware, our effort is focused on the "service registry" problem.
The goal is to provide a high-level metadata registry for services:
what services are known to the system, and for each service, what does
it do, who is it intended for, who is operating it, what kind of
service levels does it support, where's the documentation for it,
where can you get current detailed status info, etc. The data for
such a system is quite simple, of course. The tricky part is building
a (secure) system that allows the people who operate the services (of
which there are many) to register the services and maintain their
registration data themselves, but then incorporate those registrations
in a variety of community-specific registries. E.g., a service at U
Chicago is described by the U Chicago operators, but this info then is
automatically incorporated into the (distinct) registries used by
TeraGrid, OSG, CANARIE, a medical consortium, etc...
Our team began by using MDS4, but we've been replacing bits and pieces
of it for several years now and now have something that's more based
on native Apache tools and REST interfaces. We have an effort
underway to feed the results back in to Globus as a replacement for
MDS, but there is currently no estimated time for when it will appear
again in Globus.
The project is being tracked at http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/wiki/bin/view/IIS/WebHome
(a relatively new wiki for the existing project), and we have a
paper on it: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1658260.1658271. (Sorry, I
don't have an open full-text version of the paper to point you to.)
-- Lee
On Jan 21, 2010, at 4:47 PM, Adam Bishop wrote:
Greetings,
I am researching alternatives to the MDS utility previously
included in the Globus 4.x toolkit. The current iteration of the
Nimbus
monitoring plug-ins for Nagios rely on the MDS to act as the public
registry for the dynamic state of a cluster, but I would like to
evaluate alternatives. The ability for various sites to submit
gathered data to a single "master" registry which can then be queried
would be ideal. Complicated query support such as XPath is necessary;
simple presenting a snippet of XML is all that is required.
If there been any discussion or thoughts regarding an alternative to
MDS for resource publishing, I'm very interested to hear about it.
Cheers,
Adam Bishop
University of Victoria
