Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Thoughts about OGSA-DQP and DynaSOAr

We have just released OGSA-DQP 3.0. The previous two releases received fair amount of positive feedback from the community, and we hope this new release will have similar fate. DQP-3.0 is based on OGSA-DAI WSRF 2.1 and OGSA-DAI WSI 2.1. This release contains major bug-fixes, performance enhancements and most importantly, it allows the co-ordinator component to be deployed on Windows. Now I will be able to concentrate on my research – hoping to be able to start writing my thesis sometime next summer.

So, what am I trying to achieve?

In the past few months, we have also produced a Dynamic Service Oriented Architecture framework, called DynaSOAr. It provides an architecture for dynamically deploying web services remotely on a grid or the Internet. When a web service provider receives a request for a web service, it checks to see if this web service is already deployed. If it is, the call is routed straight to the deployed web service. If the web service is not deployed, the web service code is fetched from a repository and the web service is deployed on a host provider under the service provider's domain. One potential use for this architecture is for moving web services which access a database and perform analysis on the data closer to the database.

I am trying to use this idea of DynaSOAr inside OGSA-DQP by allowing dynamic deployment of the query evaluation component of DQP (called evaluator) on target hosts, dynamic deployment of analysis services, and also packaged virtual machines containing services or databases.

The evaluators are already compatible with DynaSOAr. I have also been able to create Virtual Machines using VMWare Workstation, start them on Linux hosts from a suspended state using the VMWare Player, and invoke services on them. The challenge is in transporting those VMs on the fly to and from different hosts, for which I am planning to explore several technologies like GridFTP, Peer-to-peer, etc.

Right now, I am fiddling with GRIMOIRES, a UDDI registry released by the University of Southampton. I’m planning to use it within the dynamically deployabale version of DQP. This registry will store information about the services, where they are deployed, and from where the service code can be found in case a hot-deployment is required…

Data and SOA

I just finished reading an excellent article on Service Orientation. It’s written by Pat Helland (from Microsoft), and titled – "Data on the Outside vs. Data on the Inside". Pat explores the concepts of Service Orientation, and talks about how data should be structured within the service and outside the service boundary – which has always been an interesting topic since the advent of Web Services…

Friday, December 16, 2005

Devonshire Building

This is the Devonshire Building where I work. The building is "supposedly" environment friendly, although you would see lots of screw-ups frequently, and sometimes I feel that the building looks like a huge toaster. But, what the hell, this building is quite famous now:-))
The building houses several research groups, and we are on the second floor with the Informatics Research Institute sharing the floor with us. We even have a state-of-the-art VR (Virtual Reality) suite for the VR and Imaging research...