Posted by Mark Parsons, 14 April 2009
Grid standards were supposed to make it simple to create interoperable service-oriented Grids. However, very few global Grid standards have been agreed and even fewer have been widely adopted. Why is this and what does it tell us about the global IT industry today?
The early part of this decade saw an explosion of Grid research projects trying to understand how to build a new generation of distributed computing applications which would revolutionise science and business. I was involved in this process from the beginning – helping to write CERN’s DataGRID proposal in 2000 and writing and leading a series of UK and European Grid research projects and spending many millions of Euros in the process.
From the beginning the funding bodies insisted we devote a considerable amount of our time to “standards setting”. Ever keen to ensure our proposals were funded we dutifully undertook to focus on standardisation as a key exploitation outcome. I now wonder if this was the right choice.
Many of the people I’ve worked with over the past decade have spent countless hours pursuing standards in face-to-face meetings around the world or teleconferences that have either never come to fruition or, when they have done, have been so diluted as to be pointless.
It was clear that early implementations of Grid middleware were poorly written lash-ups; written to prove an idea rather than deliver product quality software. By proposing the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) in 2003, the Global Grid Forum (largely led in this case by the Globus project and IBM) tried to move from a non-standardised distributed computing framework to a web service based platform which could be extended over time. This of course upset everyone. I now believe that this was because people wanted to experiment more before they were constrained into the OGSI standards.
It’s very interesting to look at how HTML came about. People had been playing with hypertext for many years before Tim Berners-Lee used the ideas to create HTML 1.0. At the outset HTML wasn’t a standard but it was rapidly picked up and used by so many people that it became one by default. Given the economic value that has ensued from HTML, I don’t believe it could be created today by a standards process. None of our large IT companies would sit down and allow any of their competitors to gain such advantage and the discussions would be endless.
In many ways this is what has happened to Grid standards since OGSI. Many in the IT industry saw OGSI as an IBM-inspired land-grab. All of the major vendors then marched their troops into the standards arena – largely sidelining the researchers who had conceived the underlying ideas in the first place – and halted all appreciable progress in Grid services standards thereafter. WS-RF and WS-DM tried to bring everyone together, but Microsoft and Sun countered with WS-Management. A grand plan was hatched to bring WS-DM and WS-Management together but this has still to see the light of day.
So what does this tell us about the Grid? It tells us that the distributed computing community hit upon an interesting research area at the turn of the century. So interesting in fact that the major IT vendors felt sufficiently threatened to spend large amounts of their money debating standards that now seem pointless. The world has moved on. Those of us who deliver real-world Grid computing solutions use what’s available – and we learn more about how to use these pieces of the Grid jigsaw puzzle every day. We also know that standards are important but only after the technologies on which they are based have been proven – not before – and certainly not because one IT vendor or another says so.
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