Management

Group Type: Working Group

Group Chair(s): Keisuke Fukui, Peter Ziu

Group Secretary(s): sachiko wada

Group Email: acs-wg@ogf.org (Subscribe) (Archive by date) (Archive by thread)

The ACS-WG aims at establishing a standard interface for the storing and exchanging the Archives of the Application Contents, defining the Application Repository Interface (ARI) as an OGSA service and the standard Application Archive Format (AAF). They will promote efficient and automated deployments in the Grid systems and the interoperability among the Grid implementations.

In order to install and operate complex systems such as three-tier systems more efficiently and automatically, it is necessary to specify and manage a diverse set of application related information as a unit. The Application Contents Service (ACS) provides central management of such application information. Because application contents can consist of many different artifacts, it is useful to be able to bundle them into a single archive to reduce operational overhead and minimize the possibility of inconsistency. The archive must be complete to exclude the instability and/or mismatch among the contents, but can make use of the reference to the external but stable storage to improve the efficiency in transport and storage.

The importance of a standards-based Application Contents service in conjunction with a configuration and deployment service is established in the current draft of the OGSA document:
http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/ogsa-wg/document/draft-ggf-ogsa-spec.

The Application Contents Service Working Group (ACS-WG) will focus on two main topics: a) Application Repository Interface (ARI), specifying repository service and its interface to handle archives of the Application Contents; and b) Application Archive Format (AAF), specifying archive format to register a set of Application Contents to the ACS as a unit. The Application Contents include application binaries and related information; e.g. program binaries, configuration data, procedure descriptions for lifecycle management, requirements descriptions for the hardware and underlying middleware, policy rules, and anything needed to create a task on grid systems. They may be real entities or location pointers. On the other hand, the Application Contents don�t include information updated by a task or information describing a status of a task. ACS doesn't interpret or execute information in each content, rather it just manages them for use by other OGSA-services.

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Group's Gridforge Project