Towards Open Grid Services Architecture

The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) represents an evolution towards a Grid system architecture based on Web services concepts and technologies.

Since the release of the Globus Toolkit 3.0, the Globus Project offers an open source collection of Grid services that follow OGSA architectural principles. The Globus Toolkit also offers a development environment for producing new Grid services that follow OGSA principles.

OGSA is a product of the Grid community at large, and it has a major focal point in the Global Grid Forum (GGF). Members of the Globus Alliance have made significant contributions to the development of OGSA. This page provides information on the status of OGSA work. As always, we encourage and welcome input, feedback, and collaboration.

Information on OGSA

For background and detailed information about OGSA, please use the following references.

• "The Physiology of the Grid", a research paper that proposed OGSA and laid out initial principles for its development
• "The Open Grid Services Architecture, Version 1.0", a GGF informational document
• "OGSA Tier 1 Use Case Draft Document", another related GGF document that describes a number of use cases that have informed the development of OGSA
• A two-part introduction on ogsa and developing grid computing applications using the Globus Toolkit can be found on the IBM developerworks website: part i and part ii.

WS-Resource Framework (WSRF)

WSRF is a set of Web service specifications being developed by the OASIS organization. Taken together and with the WS-Notification (WSN) specification, these specifications describe how to implement OGSA capabilities using Web services. The Globus Toolkit 4.0 and later versions provide an open source WSRF development kit and a set of WSRF services.

Standardization

Efforts are underway in the Global Grid Forum (GGF) and OASIS to document "best practices", implementation guidelines, and standards for Grid technologies. OGSA-related standards teams include:

GGF: The Open Grid Services Architecture Working Group (OGSA-WG)

GGF: Database Access and Integration Services Working Group (DAIS-WG)

OASIS: WSRF Technical Committee

Since OGSA builds on Web services, it incorporates specifications defined within the W3C, IETF, OASIS, and other standards organizations.

Support

The development of OGSA specifications and work on OGSA implementations in the Globus Toolkit have been generously supported by IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and NASA's Information Power Grid program.

Implementation Status

The first prototype Grid service implementation was demonstrated on January 29, 2002, at a Globus Toolkit tutorial held at Argonne National Laboratory. Since then, the Globus Toolkit 3.0 and 3.2 offered an OGSA implementation based on the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI), a precurser to WSRF. Currently, the Globus Toolkit 4.0 provides a set of OGSA capabilities based on WSRF. The Globus Toolkit 4.0 is an open source, community-driven software project, and it can be downloaded and used under the terms of a liberal open source license.