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, South 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 consensus by all GLIF participants.
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 many different hybrid domain controllers. This is an important first step in the iterative process towards OGF standardisation of the Network Service Interface. The task force is still looking for developers to join the interface coding team.
The Policy for Dynamic GOLEs Task Force is a new activity created at the last meeting in Seattle. In order to initiate dynamic lightpaths across different domains such as hybrid networks and GOLEs on a routine basis, a number of issues need to be resolved and there was a lively discussion during the meeting that focused on dynamic GOLE characteristics. John Vollbrecht (Internet2) agreed to chair this task force, and to continue the discussions on these issues.
The perfSONAR Task Force, headed by Thomas Tam (CANARIE) 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 service level parameters. 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 that co-locating the meeting with OGF and EGEE had helped in furthering collaboration between the two communities. He thanked the participants for the fruitful and lively discussions, as well as the local organisers for the great facilities on Sicily.
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/.