John, This list is for users of the Globus Toolkit, which is one portion of the many software products produced by the Globus team. It is primarily for user problems, and operates largely as a forum for the user community, with occasional input from members of the Globus team.
So yes, gt-dev would probably be a better place to ask your question; but as long as it has been posed, let me (speaking just as a community member) try to answer a couple of the questions that you posed below. First, the "OGSA" Open Grid Services Architecture was a set of specifications developed under the auspices of the Global Grid Forum, now the Open Grid Forum, in an effort to create a comprehensive architecture for a set of grid services based on the web services paradigm. While this was successful in part, and many of the OGSA components did find their way into a variety of products and currently operating items of distributed computing software, the Globus Toolkit was not written, I believe, to serve primarily as a reference implementation of these ideas. Instead, some components of these and of other OGF specifications did find their way into many items of software, including the Globus Toolkit. Also, while some web services ideas did survive and are currently used in a variety of software components in clouds and grids, the OGSA never did see a complete reference implementation, and more modern work has often de-emphasized the role of SOAP-based strongly-typed API interfaces for web services. Several of the other software products of the Globus team are also based on OGF standards or have roots that can trace their way back to OGF documents. Speaking now as VP of Standards for OGF, we are pleased to see this and would like, as you indicate, to see more of the components of this and other grid, cloud and distributed computing software so documented, as we believe that the open documentation of interface standards promotes interoperability of the API tools, portability of the results between projects, and security to the degree that strong authentication and traceability can be built into the resulting products. We are also concerned with issues of accessible software interfaces and of performance of the resulting infrastructure software under conditions of high scalability and load. I do think that some of the questions that you ask have to do with the completeness of the software documentation for Globus products, and not just the list of underlying standards and their documentation, so will leave these questions to the Globus team itself to answer. Thank you for the engagement, and I hope this short reply answers some of your questions. Alan On Nov 17, 2012, at 4:28 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings GT comunity, > > I have read the OGSA specification, and as far as I understand that GT is a > reference implementation of OGSA. > > However, I find it difficult to accurately map the OGSA services to the tools > and services that are provided by GT. > > For example, let's pick GRAM5. Is there any page in the GT documentation that > directly lists all the OGSA services that are implemented inside GRAM5? > > The same applies to other tools provided by GT, such as GridFTP, GASS, > GRAM...etc. > > Another inquiry is with regards to the manuals: why are there manuals only > for the following: > • GridFTP. > • GRAM5. > • GSI C, MyProxy and GSI-OpenSSH. > • Other components (C libs, XIO..etc). > What is so special about the tools/components above that makes them listed > here as manuals, while other components (e.g. GASS) are not listed? > > Rgrds, > J Alan Sill, Ph.D Vice President of Standards, Open Grid Forum Senior Scientist, High Performance Computing Center Adjunct Professor of Physics, TTU ==================================================================== : Alan Sill, Texas Tech University Office: Drane 162, MS 4-1167 : : e-mail: [email protected] ph. 806-834-5940 fax 806-834-4358 : ====================================================================
