Hewlett-Packard Company has announced plans to "further enable its enterprise infrastructure technologies for grid computing" by incorporating support for the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and Globus Toolkit into its product lines. HP already collaborates with government and industry partners in planetary scale grid computing projects. By leveraging open grid standards and industry experience, HP "plans to help customers simplify the use and management of distributed information technology resources, taking advantage heterogeneous environments and interoperability across devices. HP delivers grid-enabled services, solutions, and products to help enterprises better manage and capitalize on change."

HP has also announced "enterprise consulting within HP Services for grid-based platforms, providing management, deployment, and lifecycle support for grid architectures. The 'grid' concept was formally developed in the 1990s as a shared computing approach that coordinates decentralized resources and uses open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces to deliver high-quality service levels. The grid is designed to render almost anything in IT as a grid service -- whether computers, processing power, data, Web services, storage space, software applications, data files or devices."

From the HP Announcement

"HP started developing grid-like infrastructures more than five years ago. Grid is an important piece of the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy, where today, we see the shared computing vision soon turning into reality as commercial enterprises more aggressively seek the agility and cost benefits the grid affords," said Shane Robison, chief strategy and technology officer, HP. "The grid has the potential to solve real business problems by simplifying global access to enterprise computing services.

"For CIOs, the grid can help better synchronize business and technology demands in real time. To help realize that potential, HP has committed to grid-enable our IT systems. Over the next few years, this means products ranging from HP's smallest handhelds, printers and PCs to our most powerful storage arrays and supercomputers, will be able to connect with and serve as resources on the grid."

HP's Grid-related offerings include:

• Enterprise Grid Consulting from HP Services: This new offering will allow customers to benefit from the expertise of HP Services when applying the concepts of grid computing to commercial environments.
• Grid Software Infrastructure: Building on the HP OpenView platform, HP is extending the capabilities of the software up through the management of Web services to deliver comprehensive real-time business process intelligence and enable immediate IT resource response in the context of Web services or grid services.
• HP Utility Data Center (UDC): The HP UDC delivers many grid capabilities to commercial customers today and is compatible with OGSA standards.
• Grid Resource Topology Designer: An innovation from HP Labs, this graphical user interface allows users to simply and easily "draw" resource needs, then submit the requirements to the grid for fulfillment. The Grid Resource Topology Designer, working with the HP UDC, automatically decides on the appropriate resources to deploy to fulfill the service-level request.
• Web Services Management Framework (WSMF): HP and its partners are formalizing this framework -- a logical architecture for the management of resources, including grid and Web services. WSMF was recently submitted to the OASIS Web services Distributed Management Technical Committee as input into creating a standard management interface for all IT resources and services.
• SmartFrog: A technology developed by HP Labs, Smart Framework for Object Groups (SmartFrog) enables administrators to easily configure resources on the distributed computers that make up the grid.

About HP Customers and Partners

"HP is working closely with key customers, researchers and standards organizations to help the grid evolve from a technology concept into something that offers real commercial value. This includes efforts to ensure that the grid: (1) is built on open standards; (2) reduces complexity by enabling the management of grid services with easy-to-use standards and software; (3) enables heterogeneous systems to communicate and collaborate better together; (4) establishes trust by guaranteeing the security of participating systems and authentication of portable applications; (5) is truly robust, reliable and scalable. HP customers and partners engaged in Grid Computing include [...]:

• HP Supercomputer: "HP and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are connecting a 9.2-teraflop HP supercomputer to the DOE Science Grid. When complete, the supercomputer will be the largest attached to a computer grid anywhere in the world." See the announcement.

• National Science Foundation TeraGrid: "HP and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) formed a strategic alliance to demonstrate the potential of the National Science Foundation's extensible TeraGrid. The NSF TeraGrid will provide the nation's fastest and most powerful computing grid, with the goal of demonstrating key grid services by 2004." Accodring to the website: "When completed, the TeraGrid will include 20 teraflops of computing power distributed at five sites, facilities capable of managing and storing nearly 1 petabyte of data, high-resolution visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing. These components will be tightly integrated and connected through a network that will operate at 40 gigabits per second -- the fastest research network on the planet..."

• Gelato Federation: "HP formed the [Gelato Federation] group to focus on enabling open source Linux-based Intel Itanium Processor Family computing solutions for academic, government and industrial research. The federation is developing scalable, commodity software to enable researchers to advance studies in developing and technology-intensive areas, such as life sciences and physical sciences."

• Ongoing Collaborations: In addition to PNNL and PSC, HP has ongoing relationships with key organizations dedicated to making grid commercially viable, including CERN, the open lab for data grid applications and BIRN, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network, where HP systems are in use today for grid-based life sciences research."

• Technical Partnerships: "HP has engaged with key partners, including Avaki and Platform Computing, to advance grid in the enterprise market..." See the Avaki press release of 2003-07-28. [adapted from the announcement and HP Grid reference page]

About the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI)

Background to the Open Grid Services Architecture is provided in the Globus Project's The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration, edited by I. Foster, C. Kesselman, J. Nick, and S. Tuecke. "In both e-business and e-science, we often need to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic 'virtual organizations' formed from the disparate resources within a single enterprise and/or from external resource sharing and service provider relationships. This integration can be technically challenging because of the need to achieve various qualities of service when running on top of different native platforms. We present an Open Grid Services Architecture that addresses these challenges. Building on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, this architecture defines a uniform exposed service semantics (the Grid service); defines standard mechanisms for creating, naming, and discovering transient Grid service instances; provides location transparency and multiple protocol bindings for service instances; and supports integration with underlying native platform facilities. The Open Grid Services Architecture also defines, in terms of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces and associated conventions, mechanisms required for creating and composing sophisticated distributed systems, including lifetime management, change management, and notification. Service bindings can support reliable invocation, authentication, authorization, and delegation, if required. Our presentation complements an earlier foundational article, 'The Anatomy of the Grid,' by describing how Grid mechanisms can implement a service-oriented architecture, explaining how Grid functionality can be incorporated into a Web services framework, and illustrating how our architecture can be applied within commercial computing as a basis for distributed system integration -- within and across organizational domains..."

OGSI is available as Draft-Rec-OGSI from the Global Grid Forum: "Building on both Grid and Web services technologies, the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) defines mechanisms for creating, managing, and exchanging information among entities called Grid services. Succinctly, a Grid service is a Web service that conforms to a set of conventions (interfaces and behaviors) that define how a client interacts with a Grid service. These conventions, and other OGSI mechanisms associated with Grid service creation and discovery, provide for the controlled, fault-resilient, and secure management of the distributed and often long-lived state that is commonly required in advanced distributed applications. In a separate document, we have presented in detail the motivation, requirements, structure, and applications that underlie OGSI. Here we focus on technical details, providing a full specification of the behaviors and Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) interfaces that define a Grid service."

The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) integrates key Grid technologies (including the Globus Toolkit) with Web services mechanisms to create a distributed system framework based on the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI). A Grid service instance is a (potentially transient) service that conforms to a set of conventions, expressed as Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) interfaces, extensions, and behaviors, for such purposes as lifetime management, discovery of characteristics, and notification. Grid services provide for the controlled management of the distributed and often long-lived state that is commonly required in sophisticated distributed applications. OGSI also introduces standard factory and registration interfaces for creating and discovering Grid services.

OGSI version 1.0 defines a component model that extends WSDL and XML Schema definition to incorporate the concepts of (1) stateful Web services, (2) extension of Web services interfaces, (3) asynchronous notification of state change, (4) references to instances of services, (5) collections of service instances, and (6) service state data that augments the constraint capabilities of XML Schema definition. In this specification we define the minimal, integrated set of extensions and interfaces necessary to support definition of the services that will compose OGSA.

No specification is written in isolation, and Web services and XML are particularly dynamic and evolving environments. We intend to ensure that the evolution of OGSI conforms with broader standards that evolve. Many of the concepts we define -- for example, serviceData (Section 6) -- are special cases of more general concepts that may appear in XML documents, messages, and Web services. In addition, we anticipate that work to implement the OGSI Web services component model in various hosting environments, such as J2EE, will lead to the need for modifications to subsequent revisions of this OGSI V1.0 specification.

In this document, we propose detailed specifications for the conventions that govern how clients create, discover, and interact with a Grid service instance.1 That is, we specify (1) how Grid service instances are named and referenced; (2) the base, common interfaces (and associated behaviors) that all Grid services implement; and (3) the additional (optional) interfaces and behaviors associated with factories and service groups. We do not address how Grid services are created, managed, and destroyed within any particular hosting environment. Thus, services that conform to this specification are not necessarily portable to various hosting environments, but any client program that follows the conventions can invoke any Grid service instance conforming to this specification (of course, subject to policy and compatible protocol bindings)... [excerpted]"

Bibliographic reference: "Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI). Edited by S. Tuecke (ANL), K. Czajkowski (USC/ISI), I. Foster (ANL), J. Frey (IBM), S. Graham (IBM), C. Kesselman (USC/ISI), T. Maquire (IBM), T. Sandholm (ANL), D. Snelling (Fujitsu Labs), and P. Vanderbilt (NASA). GFD-R-P.15 (Proposed Recommendation). Copyright (c) Global Grid Forum (2003). Version 1.0. June 27, 2003. 86 pages. Comments: send email to ogsi-wg@ggf.org. See the SourceForge GGF Document Series Public Comment Project. [cache]

About the Globus Toolkit

The Globus Alliance is developing fundamental technologies needed to build computational grids. Grids are persistent environments that enable software applications to integrate instruments, displays, computational and information resources that are managed by diverse organizations in widespread locations. Based at Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, the University of Chicago, the University of Edinburgh, and the Swedish Center for Parallel Computers, the alliance produces open-source software that is central to science and engineering activities totalling nearly a half-billion dollars internationally and is the substrate for significant Grid products offered by leading IT companies..."

"The Globus Toolkit includes software services and libraries for resource monitoring, discovery, and management, plus security and file management. Its latest version, GT3, is the first full-scale implementation of new Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) specifications that the Globus Project is playing an important role in defining."