OGF makes GLIF Tech happen
- Subject: OGF makes GLIF Tech happen
- From: Kevin Meynell <meynell@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:06:09 +0000
OGF makes GLIF Tech happen
9 March 2009 -- The GLIF Technical Working Group held a meeting on 5 March 2009 in conjunction with the 4th EGEE User Forum and OGF25 in Catania, Italy. This involved forty participants from Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region who, despite the rain outside, came to quickfire agreement on a number of hot topics.
The GLIF Technical Working Group had previously merged with the former Control Plane Working Group, and the one day meeting was largely dedicated to task force activities focusing on specific issues. Demonstrating the efficiency of co-locating with OGF, just a day after the OGF-NML Working Group agreed the URN format, the GLIF Global Identifier Task Force was also able to reach consensus on a naming schema for lightpaths using URNs. The proposal will now be circulated for final approval by the GOLE (GLIF Open Lightpath Exchange) operators.
The GNI-API Task Force was created the previous year in Honolulu, and aims to produce a reference implementation of a general Application Programming Interface (API) that can communicate with all GOLE domain controllers. This might not become a standard in itself, but is an important first step in the iterative process towards OGF standardisation.The task force is still looking for developers to join interface coding team.
The Policy for Dynamic GOLEs Task Force is a new activity created at the last meeting in Seattle, USA. In order to initiate dynamic lightpaths across different domains on a routine basis, a number of policy issues need to be resolved, and there was a lively discussion on this subject during the meeting. There appear to be consensus on a 'policy free' principle for GOLEs but there still needed formal agreement on this. John Vollbrecht (Internet2) agreed to chair this task force, and to continue the discussions on these issues.
The perfSONAR Task Force had organised a successful demonstration during the Seattle meeting, but there are still some open questions and areas for enhancements (e.g. support for the Global Identifier schema). It was also agreed to rename the SLA Task Force since it more deals with the Service Level Specifications (SLS) for GOLEs. The final version of the SLS document will soon be circulated, and the GOLE operators have been asked to fill in the availability parameters on a monthly basis. The compiled matrix of the SLS parameters will then be made publicly available on the GLIF website.
Erik-Jan Bos (SURFnet), the Co-Chair of the GLIF Technical Working Group, said the meeting had been a great success, and co-locating it with the OGF had helped collaboration between the two communities. He thanked the participants for the lively discussions and the local organisers for the great facilities.
The next meetings will be held during the 9th Annual LambdaGrid Workshop in Daejeon, Korea on 27-28 October 2009.
About GLIF -- The Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) is an international virtual organisation of NRENs, consortia and institutions that promotes lambda networking. GLIF provides lambdas internationally as an integrated facility to support data-intensive scientific research, and supports middleware development for lambda networking. It brings together some of the world's premier networking engineers to develop an international infrastructure by identifying equipment, connection requirements, and necessary engineering functions and services. More information is available on the GLIF website at http://www.glif.is/.