Enhancing the PHGrid Platform to realize the vision

Last Friday I had an opportunity to sit in on a presentation given by Tom Savel and Ken Hall, Grid Value Proposition. I believe I can contribute to the effort by utilizing some of my past and current related work. Just having published the final drafts of the PHGrid Architecture documents, I began to go through several blogs, documents, and the wiki to get a full pulse check of how PHGrid could be enhanced to implement the remaining infrastructure pieces described in the Architecture documents. In my thought experiment, I believe if one places a wrapper around the Globus container, ideally, it will make it that much more manageable by one who is non-technical, a significant advantage. I believe this is an important hurtle because having come from the world of PHINMS and seeing its growth over the seven years of my involvement, lowering the support burden and enhancing the configuration via a user interface (UI) was one of the main factors in growing its user base to over 700 active nodes and growing. What was found through that experience is that the following should be well defined:

• UI and Automation for certificate exchange, renewal, distribution and revocation mechanism – this should be based on an invitation model for added security.
• UI for Node-to-Node access control which will assist in fostering secure and reliable data exchange and service/application distributions
• UI and Automation for auto-discovery and monitoring
• Queue based data transactions (Similar to PHINMS)
• A Graphical Installer (Similar to installshield type installers)
• Mechanisms that provide auto updating and patches
• A well defined support plan from deployment to long term management.

I believe the above describes the bases for realizing the full visions expressed by Tom and Ken while incorporating all of the existing PHGrid efforts. Since my background cross-sections all of the above mentioned from a technical perspective, I will try and put some things together. I will post some initial results soon. Please share your thoughts. Until next time….