PUBLICATIONS Archived Press Releases

Cees De Laat: About the Grid

By Alan Beck, Editor-In-Chief GRIDtoday September 23, 2002 Interview with Cees De Laat - Talking About the Grid An interview with Cees de Laat about the Grid in general. Dr. de Laat is senior scientific staff member of the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam. He received a PhD in Physics from the University of Delft. GRIDtoday: Our pages have seen much heated discussion over the issue of exactly how a Grid should be defined. How important is this? What is your definition of a Grid? Dr. de Laat: The definition of a grid seems intuitively easy, a definition from an encyclopedia on my laptop says: The term grid also refers to a network of electrical conductors such as that which comprises a telephone or power distribution system. Local and regional grids may be interconnected with one another to form even more complex national grids. However, translating that to collections of computers, storage devices, visualization stations, and other resources, connected via networks is not straightforward. While tapping power from the powergrid may be simple given that the correct delivery contracts are in place and electrons are always the same, doing the same with computing resource grids is infinitely more complex. However, the definition is important since it sets the scope of the problem. GRIDtoday: What are the most critical issues facing Grid development over the next few years? How would you like to see these resolved? Dr. de Laat: Resources usually belong to different entities, so an architecture eeds to be in place which allows owners to define under which circumstance somebody may use what resource. Security, integrity and protection become important issues then. Policy engines are key to that. On the mechanics of the grid resource publication, finding, allocation, scheduling, advance reservation are important issues. The OGSA efforts are for an import part trying to solve those issues. GRIDtoday: What is the ideal approach to maintaining Grid security in a world where digital dangers multiply at every turn? Dr. de Laat: Security must be build in from the bottom up. So every grid standardization document should, just like in the IETF’s RFC’s contain a security considerations paragraph. GRIDtoday: Please describe your own current work with Grid technology and its probable impact both short-and long-term. Dr. de Laat: In my group in Amsterdam we are tackling the problem of allocating Network Bandwidth to grid applications. Contrary to other resources like CPU’s a Network connection is a more elusive thing. It usually spans multiple domains and is therefore by definition a multiple domain issue. Based on work in the Authentication, Authorization and Accounting Architecture research group in the IRTF we created a generic AAA environment and defined a policy language which should be able to tackle the problem. Another part of my group works on high bandwidth large RTT TCP protocols and metering and monitoring those environments. GRIDtoday: How would you characterize European Grid projects versus those in the United States? Why is this healthy or unhealthy? Dr. de Laat: The European Grid projects are to some extend reasonably funded to do real (programming) work and equipped to build application testbeds. The duration of the projects is also such that results can be reached in the timeframes of the projects. I have no comments on the US situation. Dr. de Laat was active in data acquisition systems, heavy ion experiments and virtual laboratories. For the last six years he has been investigating applications for advanced research networks. The main emphasis is to get better Internet Quality of Service matching for grid applications in the computational sciences and computer based education domains such as distance learning, virtual laboratories, remote experimenting and distributed computing. Currently he runs projects on the national and European research networks. Topics include optical networking, lambda switching and provisioning, policy based networking and Authorization, Authentication and Accounting architecture research. He participates in the European Datagrid and the Dutch ASCII DAS project. He is responsible for the research on the Lambda switching facility, which currently is build in Amsterdam as a peer to StarLight in Chicago. He implements research projects in the GIGAport Networks area in collaboration with SURFnet. He regularly acts as panel member, invited speaker and session chair for Terena and SURFnet meetings. He is co-chair of the IRTF Authentication, Authorization and Accounting Architecture Research group and member of the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG). In the IETF he participates in the policy framework group, the Resource Allocation Protocol group. For recent work, publications and talks refer to: www.science.uva.nl/~delaat and www.aaaarch.org. Copyright 2002 GRIDtoday. Redistribution of this article is forbidden by law without the express written consent of the publisher. For a subscription to GRIDtoday, send e-mail to gridfree@gridtoday.com