Open Grid Services Architecture
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The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) describes an architecture for a service-oriented grid computing environment for business and scientific use, developed within the Global Grid Forum (GGF). OGSA is based on several other Web service technologies, notably WSDL and SOAP, but it aims to be largely agnostic in relation to the transport-level handling of data.
Briefly, OGSA is a distributed interaction and computing architecture based around services, assuring interoperability on heterogeneous systems so that different types of resources can communicate and share information.
According to the OGSA Roadmap document, OGSA is:
- An architectural process in which the GGF's OGSA Working Group collects requirements and maintains a set of informational documents that describe the architecture;
- A set of normative specifications and profiles that document the precise requirements for a conforming hardware or software component;
- Software components that adhere to the OGSA specifications and profiles, enabling deployment of grid solutions that are interoperable even though they may be based on implementations from multiple sources.
The OGSA Architecture document describes an OGSA grid in terms of the following capabilities:
- Infrastructure services
- Execution Management services
- Data services
- Resource Management services
- Security services
- Self-management services
- Information services
As of early 2006 the first version of the OGSA Architecture document and several associated documents have been published. Several normative OGSA documents are expected to be published by mid-2006, along with an updated Architecture document. Development of conformant software is expected to follow rapidly once a critical mass of normative documents have been published.
The concept of OGSA is derived from work presented in the paper "The Physiology of the Grid" by Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, Jeffrey M. Nick, and Steven Tuecke.
The Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) is related to OGSA, as it was originally intended to form the basic “plumbing” layer for OGSA. It has been superseded by WSRF and WS-Management.