Archive for September, 2008

30-5-10

Friday, September 26th, 2008

I visited Paul Walk over at UKOLN recently to talk about Shared Infrastructure Services (SIS), amongst other things, and one idea that came out of that discussion was the 30-5-10 idea.I’ll set a bit of background before ploughing into the idea itself.  Most projects at JISC do some really useful stuff that researchers, educationalists, developers and a whole range of other audiences can take and use for themselves  (in response to the cynics, we also do really useful stuff for the other projects that can’t necessarily be used straight away but it helps get us along the process to things that can be used ;-) ).  The problem we often face is that the stuff we produce isn’t used because it might not be communicated in quite the right way  or the target audience may well not be aware of it.  As a programme manager that can get very frustrating because sometimes you see an alternative widget that isn’t as good that is being used simply because the project staff or organisation they are working for are better at promoting it. So, we come to 30-5-10.  It’s intended for software or services that can be quite easily demonstrated.  So, good core candidates are some of the SIS projects and projects like NaCTeM.   The idea is this:

  •  30 seconds to get across what your project or the service(s) within your project do.  This could be used at a JISC meeting, when you’re at a conference or wherever you meet other people that might be interested in what you are doing.  The reason for 30 seconds is that within that time you should be able to get across what your project or service does in a sufficiently compelling way that it piques the interest of those who may want to use it so they want to know more.  So, if we take NaCTeM’s Termine service, the 30 seconds could go something like ‘Termine is a service supplied by the National Centre for Text Mining in Manchester to extract meaningful terms from a piece of text or a corpus of texts that are submitted to it.  It uses advanced text mining techniques to ensure that those terms are very accurate relative to the area that the body of text was submitted from.  Termine also ranks the occurrence of terms.  Possible uses include automated metadata extraction to tag the articles submitted.’.  I’m sure that if someone from NaCTeM sees this they will have a few corrections but it gives you an idea of what you would say;
  • 5  minutes to outline how to solve a problem your audience have. So you have the person or audience’s interest.  What next?   You have a dialogue with them to understand how your widget could solve a problem they have, which makes what you have done relevant to them.  This involves actively listening to what they say so they spend more time talking than you do?  There’s  a lot on active listening on the web so I won’t try to cover it here but if you’re asking open questions like ‘What kind of things that you’re doing do you think my widget would be useful for?’ as opposed to ‘Do you think this is useful?’ then you’re onto a good start; try to ensure you’re not asking questions that have yes or no answers.  In my text mining example above, I’m a stressed new programme manager who hasn’t much time to understand the background to committee papers so term extraction helps me by pulling out the key terms that I can then research on the web, making me seem knowledgeable (well, more so than Sarah Palin ;-) );
  • 10 minutes to set up a quick demo that produces results.  Even if your service or project is quite complex and has lots of configuration options, you need to be able to have something a developer can integrate pretty quickly and 10 minutes is a good target.  My term extraction example above is to some extent a bit unfair in some ways; I can submit text online and get answers in substantially less than 10 minutes but it would be good if I could do that in a RESTful way, which I can’t currently;

So there it is.  I’d welcome comments from projects or others about how do’able or sane this is but please bear in mind that the whole premise behind this is to quickly get potential users to a point where they have experienced your solution and are interested in taking it further.  They are then likely to have the patience to get to grips with that SOAP interface or spend a little more time discovering the nuances of what you’ve put together.

Posted in General, JISC | 2 Comments »

TERENA NRENs and Grids Meeting, September 2008

Friday, September 5th, 2008

Introduction

I recently attended the NRENs and Grids Meeting in Dublin, kindly hosted by Trinity College.  It gathered together a European audience of those involved in providing national education networks (hence the NRENs bit) and those involved in developing grid software and hardware.  The JISC interest in this event was that we are currently working on a number of projects and programmes with a grid related element (such as the e-Infrastructure programme and new work that we are currently formulating under the capital programme).

The programme for the event can be found here and the slides from the presentations at the event can be found in links next to the programme item.  I’ll not repeat what is on the slides in this blog entry; I’ll just point to the presentations of particular interest and comment on why I found that particular presentation interesting.

Day One – Grids

The first day focused on developments in grids.  The session on eduGAIN was particularly useful in covering how eduGAIN works; it’s quite a complex system but very effective so I’d recommend using the presentation as a 101 if you’re new to it.  Items of interest were that eduGAIN are going to be reviewing using Shib 2.0 and future developments also include non-web-based apps.  Both of these are areas that JISC is actively involved in so it would be worth following what is being done in eduGAIN.

The next presentation looked at easing access to grids via identity federations.  This was of special interest as we are currently involved in doing the same thing through the SARoNGS project.  This meant we had quite a lot to share with the group and after the coffee break Jens Jensen and I did a short presentation on what we were doing under SARoNGS, receiving some useful feedback and some good contacts to share software resources and use cases.  My feeling is that this is a useful area to link up with other European countries on as there are common problems that can be more quickly and effectively addressed through mutliple groups rather than one group on its own.  For example, we have an issue that the SARoNGS solution is constrained by UK Federation policy on passing a unique user name and sharing information between service providers, meaning it cannot be IGTF compliant and is a little less secure.  Norway has similar issues and we resolved to review what could be done in terms of a possible future change to policy that would allow a better technical solution and that would still meet the original goals of that particular aspect of the policy.  I also talked with Christoph Witzig of SWITCH and there is potential to work with them on aspects of MyProxy to make interoperability easier.

Authorisation developments in grids proved to be an interesting presntation by David Kelsey as it gave an insight into future work under EGEE.  The main messages were that there was a scaling back of funding for EGEE that has led to a great deal more focus on specific elements of the infrastructure that need to be tuned and that there was now an expectation from the EC of member states funding grid work.  The reduction in funding has meant that the technical work on middleware has been reduced and there has been a shift to focusing on the authorisation framework and an analysis of how authorisation could be more effective.  There is a broader desire to have a common policy for VOs, which would then mean that trust in them could be brokered in a similar way to the way it is in IGTF.

To wrap up the day, there was a discussion session on what we all felt would be important to address around grids.  The overwhelming part of the discussion focused on levels of assurance, something we have already looked at under the ES-LoA and FAME-PERMIS projects at JISC.   The overall agreement was that this is an area that needs to be addressed to allow new users onto the grid using a lower level of assurance, such as those with a federated ID as opposed to a digital certificate.  It’s going to be interesting to see what happens over the next year or so as members of the group grapple with this issue.  There was also some discussion on attracting more users and new users to grids.  It was generally agreed that we need to lower the bar slightly for those outside the traditional disciplines that use the grid (such as particle physicists and computational chemists).  Current initiatives in Europe would suggest that many have joined JISC in looking at how this could be done and have been succesful, SWITCH being one of the early ones with its IGTF compliant VASH and SLCS solution.

Day Two – Virtualisation

Virtualisation is something we have looked at previously under the NGS but the time was not quite right.  Day Two showed plenty of evidence that maybe it is time to go back to this area under the new round of capital funding to see what we can do.

Cloud Computing for On Demand Resource Provisioning looked at one potential method of providing virtualised resources in a grid environment.  The concept was to have  a virtualised layer to separate the virtual machine from the physical location.  Ignacio Martin Lorente explained how the University of Madrid was trialling using OpenNEbula to be able to do this and hence bring into use machines that had previously not been on the grid as well as allowing for burst traffic by using resources such as Amazon EC2.   I won’t try to explain how the whole thing works; it’s much better explained in Ignacio’s slides.  Setting up VOs on these virtualised resources can take as little as 20 seconds for a standard setup, meaning that environments can be set up and maintained easily without having to rely on being on a physical server.  Ignacio finished his presentation with a look at the RESERVOIR project under the EU Framework Programme , which is a 3 year 17m euro project to get a Next Generation Infrastructure for Service Delivery.  I think both of these projects have  interest for JISC and it was useful to have examples of how virtualisation could work within an institution and a broader initiative to get cloud computing working across Europe.

The presentation on the Challenges of Deploying Virtualisation in a Production Grid covered pretty much what it said on the tin.  Stephen Childs went through how Grid-Ireland had worked on having virtualised environments in their grid environment through open-source software called Xen.  He also covered the results of a survey he carried out to look at virtualisation.  The key points to come out were:

  • It is important to treat a virtualised environment in a production grid in exactly the same way that you would any other production environment.  Some of the virtual machines are going to be up for a long time so need patches, etc in the same way as any other physical server;
  • Virtualisation is gradually gaining ground and now there is a choice of VM software from commercial to open source, it is starting to become an activity that is being engaged in across European academic institutions.  However;
  • This activity is currently on a trial basis as people get used to what is involved in provisioning VMs as opposed to physical servers;
  • There has to be an awareness of where I/O is critical as Xen is especially weak on this at the moment, meaning a virtualised server may not be the best solution;
  • There need to be solid use cases for implementing virtualisation and it must be used appropriately.  The two main reasons for not using virtualisation in the survey were management issues and  performance;
  • A VM host does not behave in the same way as a physical host in all cases – there may be issues with compatibility even if the setup is exactly the same;
  • Monitoring is still quite flaky;

Finally, Stephen outlined how Grid-Ireland has used Xen to install, effectively, ‘grid in a box’, where institutions simply needed to host the box they were given and management was carried out by Grid-Ireland.  This was a neat solution for the institution but involved quite a lot of overhead for Grid-Ireland on management.

I thought this was a good presentation and Stephen is a useful person to talk with further about virtualisation (as further discussions over coffee proved).  He is going to look at putting the survey into a PDF format so that the results can be shared with others.

The remaining presentations covered physical infrastructure so, whilst interesting, were not quite as relevant to what we are doing in Innovation Group.

The final discussion covered future topics and certainly one that we raised was accessing data on the grid, which we are doing quite a lot of work on under the e-Infrastructure programme .

All in all, I think this is a useful group to keep in touch with as the topics they are addressing are ones that we are either currently working on or are interested in for the future.  The event provided a good opportunity to meet with others working in the same areas and share experience as well as get pointers to resources that we could use at JISC.

My thanks go to our hosts at Trinity College in Dublin, who worked very hard to make sure the event ran smoothly, with particular thanks to John Walsh for booking an excellent venue for dinner and being on hand to offer local knowledge (he even guided us back to the hotel from the restaurant!).

Posted in eResearch, JISC | No Comments »