Global Grid Forum to call up volunteers for grid working groupsAmsterdam 05 March 2001 In a welcome word to the Global Grid Forum Conference audience, Charlie Catlett, chairman of the Global Grid Forum, offered a brief survey on the goal, history, organisation, structure, and potential of the GGF Initiative. Started in 1988, the GGF has now organised for the very first time a global conference in Amsterdam where addicts to grid computing from Europe, Asia and the USA are offered the opportunity to meet, discuss, seek partnerships, and actively contribute to the different GGF working groups.
The objectives of the GGF are to actively promote interoperability and best-of-breed applications by reducing duplication and increase quality, as stated by Mr. Catlett. This is done by creating, managing and using grids for which specific grid technologies are being created. Grid conferences are enthusiastically attended by software developers, grid builders, industry and scientists from many disciplines. There are many projects hosted in the Grid such as Nees, Condor, and Legion which all three are tools for research and interoperability, as well as open source.
The first Grid workshops initially were organised in the USA but in 2000, the Grid came to Europe. The E-Grid Conference in Poznan, Poland hosted six work groups which met with the USA working groups to exchange ideas and experiences. For the Global Grid Forum 1 in Amsterdam 325 participants have registered and 60 late-registrants had to be turned down because of the limited capacity. The number of organisations has risen from 110 to 192 out of 28 countries while GGF 1 counts 85 documented authors. The next Grid Forum conference is planned in July 2001 and will take place in Washington DC.
Mr. Catlett described how several leadership teams in the GGF function as a steering group. There is also an advisory committee which consists of people from funding agencies. The advisory committee is meeting twice a year. The different GGF working groups are not static. In fact, there exist unlimited possibilities to create a new working group or sub working group. Mr. Catlett seized the opportunity to invite conference participants to contribute to the existing working groups dealing with applications and testbeds, remote data access, security, scheduling, grid computing environments, grid information services, amongst others, or even create new ones at this conference.
Working group members are involved in paper writing and also submit grid working drafts for charters, architecture or model overviews, current practice and API descriptions, and so on. Each GGF working group utilises e-mail distribution lists for discussion. You can make contributions to the Global Grid Forum by visiting the GGF Web site to sign up at http://www.gridforum.org.
Leslie Versweyveld |
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