Subject: Desktop access to remote resources, SC98 BoF

From: Gregor von Laszewski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1998 18:49:03 -0600

Please forward this mail to potential interested participants.

Birds of a Feather Session SC98, Orlando, Florida
Wednesday Nov, 10, 17:30-18:30
Room: 103A

BoF: Desktop Access to Remote Resources
==============================

This BoF will  discuss issues related to the design of an architecture,
which makes a desktop access to remote resources possible.  The term
"remote resource" is defined to include:

* compute/communication resources (supercomputers, networked
supercomputers and  metacomputers, network of workstations, and
workstations),
* data/information resources (databases, directories, dataservices), and

* compute/communication services (specialized problem solving and
visualization environments).

Goal is to develop an architecture and components which can be reused by

many projects in order to achieve simple access to the remote resources.

In terms of a Java Grande, this goal could lead to an agreed "Java
framework for computing Services" while in CORBA it would termed a
facility. In other words, one is defining a the distributed object
structure of jobs, computers and related resources. We believe that a
standard set of interfaces will help several fields including
metacomputing (computational grids), problem solving environments
including "seamless" interfaces, and performance engineering.

We present results from three working groups. These groups are

        "Interface": Defining the interface to desktop access: the
metacomputing API.
        "User requirements": Analyzing the user requirements to the
desktop access.
        "Security": Enabling a secure desktop access to remote
resources.

The security discussion is an example of the detailed considerations
that will be given to needed services

We invite the research community to a participation in this
collaborative effort.

Schedule
-------------------
 1) Introduction
 2) Report from the 1st Workshop Meeting
 3) Discussion
 4) Future plans and Meetings

 Announcements: http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~gregor/datorr