Chris Smith's Blog

The Open Grid Forum recently held it's 24th meeting at the Biopolis in Singapore, co-located with GridAsia2008. OGF meetings are a great way to learn about Grid activities happening worldwide, and OGF24 was no exception. There was definitely cloud on the mind, as evidenced by a keynote from Peter Coffee of salesforce.com and with some buzz around Singapore as one of the data centre locations for the HP/Intel/Yahoo cloud initiative. There was also a good, solid program around enterprise and e-research activities in Grid, with both a local and international focus.

For my part, as VP of the standards function at OGF, I was happy to see continued efforts around converging standards activities in the compute space (JSDL/BES/GLUE/UR), as well as some emerging activity on providing more metering and control at the network layer in the "grid stack". I ran one session at OGF24 that was intended to highlight these activities. The (perhaps mis-named) Introduction to OGF Standards workshop was intended to present the standards work of OGF, not from a working groups and specifications point of view, but from the point of view of those who are building grid systems, and thus have a use case view of their needs. The intention of the workshop was to help answer the questions about how the alphabet soup of specifications come together to solve real-world problems.

There were four main presentations:

1. Federated Data Access
2. ISV Integration with Remote Computing
3. Job Submission and Management Using Meta-Schedulers
4. Network Monitoring and Usage

(The presentations are available from the session summary link above.)

As someone involved in defining specifications at OGF, I must admit that we sometimes lose sight of the big picture in our working group sessions, so it is very useful to step back once in a while and see a landscape of how all these things fit together. We need to remember that use cases drive the standards activities, and not the other way around!