Minutes of the OGSA Data Design Team telcon, 13th April 2005.

0) New / ongoing actions

- Allen to discuss replication & InfoD with Cecille.
- Dave to find consensus on meeting date.
- Dave to mail contributors re common section structure.
- Dave to add version number to header and accept current changes.
- Dave to ask NextGrid/InfoD about transfer to non-service endpoints.

1) Early discussion 
 
* Roll call 
Allen Luniewski, IBM
Mario Antonioletti, EPCC
Mark Morgan, UVa
Fred Maciel, Hitachi
Dave Berry, NeSC

Apologies from Andrew Grimshaw.

The minutes of last week's meeting were approved.  

2) Action report

- Dave to send charter to GFSG.  [Done; The charter is now in a 7-day comment period].
- Dave to remind contributers of schedule.  [Done; Commitments received from Peter (Storage), Simon (description), Mario (DAIS), Allen and Ann (Replication)
- Dave to consult re F2F meeting [see next section].

3) F2F planning

The main OGSA WG meeting will be May 23-24 with a data day currently planned on May 25.  Unfortunately these dates overlap with an EGEE meeting that also involves Ann and Bill Alcock. 

Dave to find consensus for a date by the end of this week.

4) Replication

Update from Anne and Allen on the replication section and a discussion
of remaining issues.

Anne has written a draft.  Allen extended this to be less file-centric.  Allen has heard from Cecile Madsen from InfoD that replication is a use case for InfoD.  Allen will meet with Cecile to investigate this.  Anne will be meeting EGEE people in May.

5) Architecture document structure

* To overview or not to overview?

Dave passed on some feedback from Erwin Laure.  Erwin thinks that the document should tell more of an interlinking story, e.g. beginning with Storage (files, databases), then Access (ByteIO, DAIS), then Transfer (staging, replication), and finally higher-level services such as federation.  Dave commented that there might be a better order and that a minimal start would be to expand the last section of the introduction and to add linking text to each section.

Mario suggested that some pictures might help to show the conceptual view.  Allen asked whether would pictures help us to write the individual sections, or would we make more progress working on details first?  Mario thought pictures would help.

Dave commented that his earlier attempt at writing an overview had got out of hand.  Too much material had been needed to explain the overview that it ended up duplicating significant amounts of later text.  Mario thought that this is why a picture might help.  Allen suggested making a stake in the ground for an overview that could be iterated later.

Dave suggested that maybe we should start writing up scenarios - explanations of how the interfaces and services interact to implement use cases.  This is part of the design team's remit.

We recognise the need for more work but no-one currently has the time to address it.

* Data transfer to non-service devices?

Mario asked whether the data transfer infrastructure should support transfer to non-service devices.  DAIS already does this.  Fred concurred that use cases exist, e.g. using iSCSI.

Dave asked whether this would fit in with the general architecture or whether individual services should implement their own support.  Mario responded that some of the architecture would fit although obviously it could only offer more limited support for non-service devices.

Fred asked whether GridFTP requires services at the end points.

Dave asked whether InfoD consider non-service endpoints?

We agreed to flag this as an issue for NextGrid/InfoD.


* Section structure.

We discussed the idea of a common structure for each section.   Dave will mail current writers.


* General.

Mario suggested adding the version number to the header.  Dave suggested accepting the current changes.


6) Wrap up
	DONM 20th April.