[AG-TECH] RE: **ACE-grid** ACE Collaboration services - A discussion document

[Brian Corrie]

Hello all,

As Jason has said (see email below), we are organizing an AG meeting to
discuss ACE collaboration services, why they are important, and how they
should be described. This is a continutation of the "ACE collaboration
services" discussion that we had at GGF in Seattle. As a point of discussion,
here is a brief position statement from my point of view... This is based on
the GGF discussion from Seattle (powerpoint provided).
http://calder.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ACE-grid/2003-06-24_GGF8/GGF8-corrie.ppt

We are planning on having a meeting either September 10, 11, or 12. Please
let us know if you are interested in participating and if so which
dates/times are best.

I have cross posted this to the ag-tech mailing list as I think there will be
people there that are interested in this area that may not be on the ACE
list...

>From our point of view, providing a succesful collaboration requires a number
of steps. One has to:

1) Understand the collaboration task being undertaken
2) Understand the needs required to accomplish the task
3) Determine the collaboration services required to meet those needs
4) Determine how to deliver those services most effectively on the technology
available to the user.

My goal in moving this discussion forward is to define what we mean by a
collaboration service so that we can perform the mapping from needs (2 above)
to services (3 above) to technologies (4 above).

To accomplish the mapping from need to service the services have to be well
defined. They should be standards based and not application based if
possible. We need to be able to identify what services meet the needs of the
collaboration task and be able to combine them in a very flexible manner to
accomplish that task. That means that services need to work together to
accomplish an overall goal that can be quite complex. To determine how to do
that one needs to know alot about the "capabilities" of the services. It is
probably necessary to classify services into groups that satisfy a given need
(classes might be audio, video, shared presentation, application sharing,
floor control, turn taking, visualization, ...). For example, a specific
collaboration task may NEED audio, video, and shared presentation. There may
be a number of services that provide a solution for each need. Vic,
netmeeting, realvideo, and quicktime all satisfy the need to have video. The
NEED has certain requirements (interactive video) and services have certain
capabilities (vic is interactive, realvideo is not). If one knows the needs
of the task and the capabilities of the services we can map from need to
service to come up with a set of services that satisfy the needs of a
collaboration (vic satisfies the interactive video need while realvideo does
not). Thus far we are talking at an abstract level that is focused on
accomplishing the task at hand as succesfully as possible. We call this
"Quality of Experience" or QoE.

Once a set of services is identified for a task, we need to map those
services onto a set of technologies to actually deliver the collaboration. To
do this, we need to know both the resources required for the services and the
capabilities of the devices that the services are going to be running on.
Running vic at 256Kb/s h261 codec requires 256kb/s bandwidth per video stream
and 50%CPU + 10% per video stream (I know, % CPU is not the best metric in
the world 8-). Machine A is connected to the other collaborators over the
research network at 10 Mbps and has a video capture capability. If we know
this information for each service in a collaboration and each machine being
used we can make intelligent aggregate decisions at the task level about what
machines should run which services and more importantly when and how the
system should compromise on specific needs to make the collaboration as high
quality as possible (degrade the video quality rather than have poor audio in
the collaboration).

To perform any of these mappings it is critical to define what a
collaboration service is and what its capabilities and attributes are. More
importantly, if we can describe service capabilities in a well defined
manner, then a true service model can be built in which services can be used
across multiple systems but decisions can be made about the collaboration
task at the task level.

So what are the questions we need to ask (from the powerpoint)?

How do we classify collaboration services (or do we need to)? 
How do we describe collaboration services?
	- What class of service is it?
	- What are its capabilities (what can it do)?
	- How does it do it (protocols, standards)?
	- What does it require (memory, bandwidth, CPU)?
How do we register collaboration services (registration and discovery)?
How do we instantiate services (service creation)?

That is our view of collaboration services and how they should be described.
I hope that it is relatively clear. I would welcome any discussion on this
topic and I hope to see some of you at the AG meeting next month...

Cheers,

Brian


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Leigh [mailto:spiff at evl.uic.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 5:37 PM
> To: 'Ace'
> Subject: RE: **ACE-grid** ACE Collaboration services
> 
> 
> Looks like there is a conflict with the AG2 tutorial. How 
> about Sept 10,
> 11 or 12?
> 
> Jason
> 
>  ----------------
> Jason Leigh, PhD
> Associate Professor, Computer Science Department
> spiff at evl.uic.edu              Electronic Visualization Lab (M/C 152)
> EVL Phone (312) 996-3002         University of Illinois at Chicago
> EVL FAX   (312) 413-7585         851 S. Morgan St. Room 1120 SEO
> http://www.evl.uic.edu/spiff     Chicago, IL 60607-7053 
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-ace-grid at gridforum.org 
> > [mailto:owner-ace-grid at gridforum.org] On Behalf Of Jason Leigh
> > Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 3:19 PM
> > To: Ace
> > Subject: **ACE-grid** ACE Collaboration services
> > 
> > 
> > Hi
> > Brian and I are planning to hold an AG meeting to elaborate on ACE
> > collaboration services that was discussed at GGF8. For those 
> > interested,
> > please indicate your prefered dates for the meeting: Sept 3 
> or 4 or 5.
> > 
> > Here are notes from the last discussion:
> > http://calder.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ACE-grid/2003-06-24_GGF8/GGF8-corrie.ppt
> > 
> > Thanks
> > Jason
> > 
> >  ----------------
> > Jason Leigh, PhD
> > Associate Professor, Computer Science Department
> > spiff at evl.uic.edu              Electronic Visualization Lab 
> (M/C 152)
> > EVL Phone (312) 996-3002         University of Illinois at Chicago
> > EVL FAX   (312) 413-7585         851 S. Morgan St. Room 1120 SEO
> > http://www.evl.uic.edu/spiff     Chicago, IL 60607-7053 
> > 
> 
>