Chris Smith's Blog

OGF23 was held last week in Barcelona in conjunction with the BEinGRID industry days events. OGF events, in addition to having great program content, are an excellent way to keep in touch with Grid computing practitioners all over the world, and OGF23 was no exception.

Some of the highlights for me.....

Standards Convergence

For a number of years now I have worked on specifications for interfaces to job management systems in the form of JSDL, OGSA-BES, HPC Profile and friends. We're now to the point where we have multiple implementations of these specifications, such as the BES++ project. What we had "punted" on for quite a while is a comprehensive information model that could be used to describe the resources available to run jobs on. This gap is now possible to fill with the publishing of the GLUE schema as a public comment document! While standards in general are not designed to excite, seeing all these bits and pieces come together after a long time is very satisfying for those of us who have been working on them. Good work GLUE-WG!

Cloud Workshop and Sessions

Cloud was a big theme of the conference, with some great content in the form of a keynote from Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), and with 2 workshop sessions on cloud with presentations from Cohesive FT and CERN among others. It's still not clear how Grids and Clouds converge, but intuitively there is an intersection point somewhere.

OGF-Europe

OGF-Europe is an EU funded project that is intended to help collect information on the use of Grid in Europe, as well as promote the use of Grid across multiple industries and customer sizes. As somebody who works on standards, it is easy to get wrapped up in the small details of how things work, and to see OGF as providing a valuable venue for doing this work. What is hard is to see the bigger picture around Grid usage and value to organizations. OGF-Europe will definitely provide some much needed external (to OGF) facing activities. Hopefully they will create some demand for our specs!

Green IT Workshop

The Grid Computing Now team organized 2 workshops on the opportunity to use Grid techniques to make data centres more efficient and environmentally friendly.

Data Management Sessions

The session presentations can be found here. The European Grid community presented on the various techniques that they have used to deal with very large and distributed data sets, for both files and relational data. I never knew that anybody was using Oracle RAC on over 140 servers!


For some other perspectives on the conference (and some video highlights) check out the GridCast at OGF23 blog.