ALP-CoABS Interprogram Technology Integration

Executive Summary

Progress for April 1999

• I sent Brian Kettler two sets of comments on version 0.9 of the Grid Vision document.
• I sent Brian Kettler two sets of comments,  and some revised material on ALP, for version 1.0 of the Grid Vision document.
• I interacted with Brian Kettler regarding details of the Grid prototype ISX is implementing.
• I found some interesting material (from the Defense Secretary's 1998 Annual Report) describing the Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability (which I had mentioned in my Grid whitepaper revision) as a grid implementation; see http://www.dtic.mil/execsec/adr98/chap15.html , and sent the reference to Brian Kettler and Craig Thompson.
• I worked on a revision of the ALP-CoABS Design Document, specifically including details of some individual proposed Technical Exchange Areas (TXAs), some additional detail on ALP (as overview material for CoABS readers), and some material motivating the TXAs.  In the process, I sent several sets of additional questions on ALP to Marshall Brinn, and received his responses.
• I completed a short report describing some proposed initial Technical Exchange Areas (TXAs) between ALP and CoABS, and sent it to Jim Hendler, Todd Carrico, Marshall Brinn, and Brian Kettler, together with some suggestions for next steps (the material in this report will later be added to the Design Document).
• I worked on a talk I'm giving at Dartmouth in May on mobility and agent architectures.
• I downloaded and read some white papers from ODI on their eXcelon XML server.
• I engaged in email and phone discussions with Craig Thompson on compositional trader/broker functionality in the context of the Grid.
• I did some background reading in Jacques Ferber's book Multi-Agent Systems (very readable) and a new MIT Press Journal Markup Languages:  Theory & Practice.
• I read an interesting paper on "Performance Limitations of the Java Core Libraries" (downloadable from http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/mercator/research.html) which described how some implementation decisions made in these libraries hurt performance in some applications, and how to address the limitations.

Plans for May 1999

• continue interactions with Brian Kettler and Marshall Brinn regarding ALP-CoABS technology transfer ideas.
• get feedback on the proposed Technical Exchange Areas (TXAs) and flesh our further details
• circulate the TXA descriptions to CoABS TIE coordinators and key PIs  to identify further TXA details
• incorporate TXA descriptions and other material in the Design Document