On 23 Apr 2011, at 23:16, "Mattmann, Chris A (388J)" 
<chris.a.mattm...@jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:

> Hi Guys,
> 
> Looks great and sounds very complimentary to OODT. Happy that you guys 
> mention alignment -- might be nice to expose data from an OODT file 
> management+workflow management+resource management system as a Airavata 
> gateway. Just a quick thought after skimming the proposal.

Yes, I felt such an alignment may well make sense. However, I'm only the 
champion, not a committer so I'll not commit the team to such an opportunity. 

I look forward to learning more once we are in the incubator. 




Sent from my mobile device.
> 
> Good stuff!
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris
> 
> On Apr 23, 2011, at 2:53 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:
> 
>> I would like to propose Airavata for entry into the Apache Incubator.
>> 
>> The full proposal can be found at [1] and is copied at the end of this
>> mail. For those in a hurry here's a quick summary:
>> 
>> Airavata is a software toolkit currently used to build science gateways
>> but that has a much wider potential use. It provides features to
>> compose, manage, execute, and monitor large scale applications and
>> workflows on computational resources ranging from local clusters to
>> national grids and computing clouds. Users can use Airavata back end
>> services and build gadgets to deploy in open social containers such as
>> Apache Rave and modify them to suite their needs. Airavata builds on
>> general concepts of service oriented computing, distributed messaging,
>> and workflow composition and orchestration.
>> 
>> Airavata will provide web interfaces and scalable Service Oriented
>> Architecture based backend services to build or enhance Science Gateway
>> (see https://www.teragrid.org/web/science-gateways/) and similar
>> environments. Airavata will specifically focus on:
>> 
>> 1.  sophisticated server-side tools for registering and managing large
>> scale applications on computational resources.
>> 
>> 2.  graphical user interfaces to construct, execute, control, manage and
>> reuse of scientific workflows.
>> 
>> 3.  interfacing and interoperability with with various external (third
>> party) data and provenance management tools
>> 
>> The project team consists of a number of existing Apache Committers and
>> the code comes from the same stable as some of the code donated to
>> Apache Rave (Incubating).
>> 
>> We welcome your questions, suggestions, observations and support.
>> 
>> Ross
>> 
>> [1] http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/AiravataProposal
>> 
>> FULL PROPOSAL TEXT
>> ==================
>> 
>> = Airavata Proposal for Apache Incubator =
>> 
>> == Abstract ==
>> Airavata is a software toolkit currently used to build science
>> gateways but that has a much wider potential use. It provides features
>> to compose, manage, execute, and monitor large scale applications and
>> workflows on computational resources ranging from local clusters to
>> national grids and computing clouds. Users can use Airavata back end
>> services and build gadgets to deploy in open social containers such as
>> Apache Rave and modify them to suite their needs. Airavata builds on
>> general concepts of service oriented computing, distributed messaging,
>> and workflow composition and orchestration.
>> 
>> 
>> == Proposal ==
>> 
>> Airavata will provide web interfaces and scalable Service Oriented
>> Architecture based backend services to build or enhance Science
>> Gateway (see https://www.teragrid.org/web/science-gateways/)
>> and similar environments. Airavata will specifically focus on:
>> 
>>  1. sophisticated server-side tools for registering and managing large
>> scale applications on computational resources.
>>  2. graphical user interfaces to construct, execute, control, manage
>> and reuse of scientific workflows.
>>  3. interfacing and interoperability with with various external (third
>> party) data and provenance management tools.
>> 
>> == Background ==
>> Working in close quarters with Apache Axis2 committers and inspired by
>> the true open source community driven software development of ASF,
>> Suresh Marru and Marlon Pierce have been pioneering the idea of a
>> Science Gateways software-based Apache project since late 2008. Many
>> Apache members have fostered these ideas and guided them to arrive at
>> this proposal.
>> 
>> Currently the software is a actively used in various science
>> gateways. But the tools are general purpose and build upon widely used
>> Apache tools like Axis2, ODE engine. The core team is motivated to
>> expand the community and build a community welcoming both synergistic
>> software components and also new usage scenarios.
>> 
>> It is perhaps worth noting that one of the three seed projects that
>> make up the Apache Rave (Incubating) project is also the product of
>> this same team and is derived from the same Science Gateways
>> community.
>> 
>> == Rationale ==
>> 
>> The nature of computational problems has evolved from simple desktop
>> calculations to complex, multidisciplinary activities that require the
>> monitoring and analysis of remote data streams, database and web
>> search and large ensembles of simulations. In the academic domain
>> Science Gateways have emerged to address these needs and have built
>> software platforms that provide a community of users with the ability
>> to easily solve computational problems within a specific domain. The
>> tools developed to support these gateways are potentially of value to
>> any organisation needing to perform complex computations. Gateways
>> provide a convenient interface to the underlying infrastrucure without
>> the need for a deep understanding of the intricacies that
>> infrastructure.
>> 
>> We summarize the rationale for choosing The Apache Software Foundation
>> (ASF) below. This is what we hope to gain from participating in the
>> ASF.
>> 
>>  1. '''Broader impact''': our science gateway tool set is based on
>> Service Oriented Architecture principles, and it has always been our
>> goal to align our software with broader trends in the development of
>> software for distributed systems.  Participating in the ASF provides a
>> concrete way to implement this idea.  In particular, we have done
>> extensive work on the workflow systems, messaging, and application
>> management as Web services from the perspective of computational science
>> use cases (i.e., high failure rates, very long running jobs, dynamic
>> service creation, workflows not expressible as directed acyclic graphs,
>> etc). These requirements and our work to implement them have already had
>> direct impact on the Apache Axis 2 and Apache ODE projects. As an Apache
>> project, it is hoped that our community will have an enhanced
>> opportunity for collaboration and complementary development with Apache
>> Hadoop (for scientific application management), Apache QPID (for
>> messaging), Apache Rave (incubator - Open Social Container) and others.
>> It is our goal to expand our software’s usage beyond just science
>> gateways to the broader enterprise community.
>>  2. '''Sustainability''': Science gateway software development (and
>> cyberinfrastructure software generally) is primarily funded in the US by
>> the National Science Foundation (NSF), so the long term sustainability
>> of software across funding cycles is a longstanding problem.  The NSF is
>> attempting to solve this problem, and its vision for sustainable
>> software is described  here:
>> http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10015/nsf10015.jsp. Participating in the
>> ASF is our project’s vision for reaching software sustainability that
>> underpins the NSF CF21 vision.  As a successful ASF project (after
>> incubation), we will have created a community led, rather than funding
>> led, environment for the development of our sotware. This community,
>> through our community engagement work and adoption of meritocratic
>> principles, will expand beyond our current core team and existing
>> project collaborations.  This will greatly increase the chances that our
>> software will continue to grow and improve beyond the participation of
>> any individuals.
>>  3. '''Maturity''': much of the software included in this proposal was
>> developed initially by graduate students as part of their Ph. D. work.
>> The Open Grid Computing Environment has devoted significant effort
>> (through salaried staff and volunteers from collaborating institutions)
>> to convert these research projects into mature, reliable, well-written,
>> packaged components.  The code is currently hosted at SourceForge, but
>> we recognize the need to go beyond just the SourceForge support tools to
>> participate in a real community of software engineering experts. It is
>> our desire, through the Apache Incubator, to take our software
>> engineering efforts to a higher level by learning from the substantial
>> experience of appropraite Apache Committers. Apache mentors will provide
>> initial guidance, as will  the attraction of additional committers from
>> the relevant Apache projects.
>> 
>> == Initial Goals ==
>> 
>>  * Implement a standalone version of the code base with a simple hello
>> world service, workflow and gadget(s) to access the examples.
>>  * Migration of documentation and design knowledge from existing SF
>> project
>>  * Re-architect Grid based security (GSI) dependencies and adopt more
>> general purpose security implementations.
>>  * Make sure Cloud (including hadoop) support is more first class.
>>  * Aim to have the first Apache release within the first 6 months
>>  * Verify with Apache Legal that some of the more esoteric licences in
>> our dependencies are acceptable, or replace them as appropriate
>> 
>> == Current Status ==
>> 
>> The proposed tools are currently hosted on SourceForge at
>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogce/ (source at
>> https://ogce.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ogce/ogce-xbaya-gui/) and are
>> described at http://www.collab-ogce.org.
>> 
>> == Meritocracy ==
>> 
>> A significant portion of initial committers are already ASF
>> Committers/Members,
>> and the entire team is well experienced with open source software
>> development. The existing code base has resulted from
>> multi-institutional collaborative projects. The developers are well
>> aware of the Apache way and will honor the meritocracy policy of ASF
>> foundation.
>> 
>> == Community ==
>> 
>> To date our focus has been serving our immediate partners needs rather
>> than looking outwards in order to build a broader community with
>> diverse needs. Whilst the core team area likely to remain focussed on
>> the Science Gateways communities we are keen to welcome community
>> members from other disciplines.
>> 
>> == Core Developers ==
>> Our core developers consist of participants from academic,
>> not-for-profit and for-profit organisations. Many are already well
>> versed in The Apache Way.
>> 
>> Amongst our initial team we have one or more committers on the
>> following Apache top level projects; axis, geronimo, synapse, ws,
>> ws-pmc, ws-woden as well as Apache Rave (Incubating).
>> 
>> == Alignment ==
>> Airavata software is built upon Apache Projects like Axis2, ODE,
>> Rampart, Tomcat and Maven. We will try to closely align the project
>> with ODE to ensure BPEL workflow compatibility. We will align with
>> metadata management projects like Apache OODT. Web interfaces within
>> the Airavata software will be synergistically developed with Apache
>> Rave.
>> 
>> == Known Risks ==
>> === Orphaned products ===
>> We acknowledge the need to seek project contributions outside the current
>> developers. The core team actively travels and conducts workshops and
>> tutorials at relevant academic conferences like Supercomputing, TeraGrid,
>> Collaborative Technologies Systems and SciDAC. Previous experiences
>> have showed that these tutorials and outreach efforts will bring in
>> community participation. The general strategy will be to encourage
>> users to be active in the community and develop patches and
>> contribute. Also, the core developers use the Airavata software in
>> multiple projects with a life span ranging from 2 to 10 years, so the
>> risk of orphaned products is very minimal.
>> 
>> Furthermore, by opening our doors to non-academic organisations
>> already adopting large scale computation related projects in the ASF
>> we hope to be able to build community beyond the proposing teams
>> Science Gateway interests.
>> 
>> === Inexperience with Open Source ===
>> The core team is very familiar with open source practices. The
>> developers include existing Apache members who have long term experience
>> with
>> the Apache Way. The OGCE project has been an active
>> open source project in SourceForge since November 2006. We welcome the
>> new directions and are well prepared to follow the Apache way.
>> 
>> === Homogenous Developers ===
>> We have a semi-distributed development environment distributed among
>> Indiana University and Lanka Software Foundation. We fully expect
>> contributions from the partnering science gateways adding to the
>> heterogeneous development.
>> 
>> === Reliance on Salaried Developers ===
>> The core developers are self motivated on the project and also are
>> funded through various federal, state and endowment research
>> grants. Participation in these research efforts based on Airavata
>> software is mostly voluntary and above and beyond the requirements of
>> the salaried jobs.
>> 
>> The Open Gateway Computing project, from which the initial code
>> donation is sourced, is funded for the next 3 years and is mandated by
>> the funding guidelines to open source software development -
>> http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1032742. We
>> believe in the Airavata software capabilities and its vital role in
>> providing sustainable middleware for Science Gateways. Nevertheless,
>> the core team will actively build upon Airavata software and foster
>> developer community outside the current core.
>> 
>> === Relationships with Other Apache Products ===
>> See “Alignment” above.  Airavata is based on the concepts of Service
>> Oriented Architecture and all services run within Tomcat
>> container. The web services are based on Axis2. The orchestration of
>> the scientific workflows uses Orchestration Director Engine. The
>> software is built using Apache Maven.
>> 
>> === An Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand ===
>> The Apache brand would certainly help promote the software suite, but
>> gaining the brand is not the motivation for this project. Airavata is
>> being proposed to Apache because of the belief in Apache’s meritocracy
>> model for mentored, community-driven, open source software is the best
>> way to develop sustainable software. See “Rational” above. Most
>> importantly, The Apache Software Foundation will help us create an
>> institution-neutral contribution venue and will help us build a
>> long-standing community around Airavata to sustain and improve it
>> beyond the span of specific, targeted research grants.
>> 
>> == Documentation ==
>> Existing documentation is available from the OGCE wiki,
>> http://www.collab-ogce.org/ogce/index.php/Main_Page. In addition,
>> there is abundance of presentation and self guided video tutorial
>> material. Effort will be put in to collect all this information into
>> meaningful documentation on the Apache websites.
>> 
>> == Initial Source ==
>> The initial source of the project is in SourceForge. The source is
>> available for anonymous check out from svn at
>> https://ogce.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ogce/ogce-xbaya-gui/
>> 
>> == Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan ==
>> Indiana University is the current holder of Intellectual Property
>> rights for the software. The university has approved the code donation
>> and signed trustees approval, Corporate Contributor Licence Agreement
>> and Software Grant Agreement have been emailed to ASF secretary and
>> received acknowledgement.
>> 
>> Specifically Indiana University will donate 4 components into Airavata
>> project.
>> 
>>  1. XBaya Scientific Workflow Suite - includes a GUI for workflow
>> composition and monitoring. The composed workflow can be exported to
>> various workflow languages like BPEL, SCUFL, Condor DAG, Jython and
>> Java. The defacto workflow enacting engine used is Apache ODE.
>>  2. GFac - an application wrapper service that can be used to wrap
>> command line-driven science applications and make them into robust,
>> network- accessible services. This component is build on Axis2 web
>> service stack.
>>  3. XRegistry - a registry service for storing deployment information
>> about wrapped application services and constructed workflows.
>>  4. WS-Messenger - a “publish-subscribe” based message broker
>> implemented on top of Apache Axis2 web services stack. It implements the
>> WS-Eventing and WS-Notifications specifications and incorporates a
>> message box component that facilities communications with clients behind
>> firewalls and overcomes network glitches.
>> 
>> == External Dependencies ==
>> 
>> Following the guideline -http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html, the
>> following are the dependent software and all of them are in binary
>> format in java archive (jar files).
>> 
>>   * CDDL license  - Javax activation, JSR311, Portlet-API, Servlet-API
>>   * Apache V2: cog-jglobus, globus, caster, gridsphere, Woodstox,
>> xmpp, xsul, sigiri, atomixmiser, weps-beans.
>>   * BSD: puretls,
>>   * MIT: bcporv, hsqldb, dom4j, slf4j
>>   * PSFL: Jython
>>   * GPL 2.0: mysql-connector-java
>>   * Other:
>>     * cryptix32, cryptix-asn1 (http://www.cryptix.org/LICENSE.TXT)
>>     * backport (public domain)
>>     * jaxen (http://jaxen.codehaus.org/license.html)
>> 
>> Licence incompatibilities (GPL) will be resolved during incubation.
>> 
>> == Cryptography ==
>> The software does not implement any cryptographic algorithms. However,
>> to perform secured messaging and data movement and SSL communications,
>> the software depends upon third party security libraries. These
>> external libraries depend in turn on Java Security, Puretls, Cryptix
>> and Bounce Castle libraries. Apache Cryptographic steps will be
>> followed to register the use of these libraries.
>> 
>> == Required Resources ==
>> 
>> === Mailing lists ===
>>  1. airavata-dev
>>  2. airavata-commits
>>  3. airavata-private
>> 
>> === Subversion Directory ===
>> https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/airavata
>> 
>> === Issue Tracking ===
>> We intend to make use of Jira for issue tracking. Proposed key: AIRAVATA
>> 
>> === Other Resources ===
>> 
>> We intend to manage our website using the Apache CMS.
>> 
>> == Initial Committers ==
>> Names of initial committers with affiliation and current ASF status:
>> 
>> || '''Name'''           || '''Email'''            || '''Affiliation'''
>>       || '''ICLA''' || '''ASF Status''' || '''Apache Id''' ||
>> || Suresh Marru         || sma...@cs.indiana.edu  || Indiana University
>>       || On File || Apache Commiter || smarru    ||
>> || Marlon Pierce        || mpie...@cs.indiana.edu || Indiana University
>>       || On File || Apache Commiter || mpierce   ||
>> || Srinath Perera       || hemap...@apache.org    || Lanka Software
>> Foundation || On File || Apache Member   || hemapani  ||
>> || Aleksander Slominski || aslom at us.ibm.com    || IBM
>>       || On File || Apache Member   || aslom     ||
>> || Raminderjeet Singh   || rami...@indiana.edu    || Indiana University
>>       || On File || Apache Commiter || raminder  ||
>> || Archit Kulshrestha   || akuls...@indiana.edu   || Indiana University
>>       || On File || N/A             || N/A       ||
>> || Chathura Herath      || chath...@apache.org    || Indiana University
>>       || On File || Apache Commiter || chathura  ||
>> || Eran Chinthaka       || chinth...@apache.org   || Indiana University
>>       || On File || Apache Member   || chinthaka ||
>> || Thilina Gunaratne    || thil...@apache.org     || Indiana University
>>       || On File || Apache Commiter || thilina   ||
>> || Wathsala Vithanage   || waths...@opensource.lk || Lanka Software
>> Foundation || On File || N/A             || N/A       ||
>> 
>> All the parties are affiliated with companies and organizations that
>> are familiar with the development of open source. We expect that the
>> amount of volunteer work will increase, and more developers will come
>> on board.
>> 
>> == Champion ==
>> Ross Gardler, Apache Software Foundation
>> 
>> == Nominated Mentors ==
>>  * Ross Gardler, Member, Apache Software Foundation
>>  * Alek Slominski, Member, Apache Software Foundation
>>  * Ate Douma, Member, Apache Software Foundation
>>  * Sanjiva Weerawarna, Member, Apache Software Foundation
>>  * Paul Fremantle, Member, Apache Software Foundation
>> 
>> == Sponsoring Entity ==
>> Apache Incubator Project.
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
> Senior Computer Scientist
> NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA
> Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246
> Email: chris.a.mattm...@nasa.gov
> WWW:   http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
> University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> 
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