Future Development

GRIA was initially developed within the EC IST GRIA project, which ended in 2004. GRIA continues to be enhanced to meet the needs of industry through developments in many projects including EC NextGRID, EC SIMDAT, EC BRIDGE, EC edutain@grid, EC BEinGRID, EC ArguGRID, EC GridEcon, EC BREIN, ECIRMOS, UK TSB projects Avatar-M, UK TSB MUPPITS, EC SERSCIS and EC PRESTOPRIME.

GRIA 4.0 has also been used by the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute as the basis for their middleware, and some components are still common between the two. The main difference between the OMII and GRIA middleware is that while OMII focuses on supporting e-Science users, GRIA focuses on the needs of industry and places greater emphasis on providing managed and secure processes for managing resources and services. Early releases of GRIA provided four core services for managing billing accounts, resource allocations, data storage and job execution. GRIA 4.3 provided additional services for relational database access (OGSA-DAI 7.0 WS-I) and distributed workflows (based on IT Innovation's FreeFluo enactor), which were integrated into the GRIA framework.

GRIA 5 was designed to make it much easier for users to add their own services and make them manageable through SLAs and chargeable through the account service. GRIA 5 provided significant enhancements to the Basic and OGSA-DAI application service packages along with other usability and performance enhancements to other packages GRIA now support JSDL, integration of multiple heterogeneous resource managers at a single service provider and instrumentation of resource managers and applications for SLA based management.

The latest GRIA release is GRIA 5.3, which has a modular service-oriented architecture, based on use of key Web Service interoperability standards including an industrial WSRF profile using the WS-I doc/literal profile, and updated security features based on WS-Trust/WS-Federation token-based security patterns. GRIA 5.3 includes four main components:

• a service provider management package, incorporating an improved billing account service and a new service for setting up service level agreements (SLA)
• a client management package, comprising a membership service that issues tokens to users and supports policy federation with service providers, and a registry service for client side registration and discovery of resources;
• a basic application service package, containing job and data storage services; and
• a client framework, providing management GUIs for the management services and the basic applications, and APIs for developing client-side applications and adding further services.

GRIA has a modular service-oriented architecture, based on the use of key Web Service interoperability standards. GRIA 5.3.1, released Dec 2008, addresses barriers to adoption such as integration with enterprise identity systems (MS ActiveDirectory / LDAP), enhanced policy-driven client API for intelligent service and resource selection, support for software licensing models building on multi-party federations and improved interoperability with .NET through the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Client API.

GRIA 6 research and development has now started targeting management and governance infrastructure for service providers participating in dynamic service networks. Service dependability and performance management will be supported using new metric and commitment models for converged Future Internet services such as collaborative decision support, media delivery, 3D Internet, and long-term digital preservation. New lifecycle models are being investigated that consider the perspectives of business and technical actors and allow for greater flexibility between service implementation, SLA negotiation and resource provisioning decisions. Uncertainty management in service provision will be specifically addressed by tracking events and probabilities using service management rules, system modelling tools and an event-driven architecture. Early versions of core services will be available late 2009 with a fully integrated infrastructure due for release in spring 2010.