Overwhelming participation to Global Grid Forum in Edinburgh feeds fear for overhyping

Apart from the working groups, GGF has research groups. The participants of research groups investigate and report on areas of interest, where it is not clear whether they are of immediate interest and what should or could be done in it.

The GGF standardisation procedures and intellectual property rights (IPR) are modelled after the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Most importantly, owners of patented or copyrighted material should grant usage thereof on specified, reasonable, non-discriminatory terms.

Catlett says that modelling GGF IPR rules to follow the IETF ones simplifies the work of lawyers, enabling companies to delegate knowledgeable people to the Working Groups.

During the past six months, GGF has also grown, because of mergers with the NPI (New Productivity Initiative) and the Peer-to-Peer working group. P2P computing is now dubbed "Desktop Grid".

The working group format process has also been streamlined during this period. Groups are now clustered into areas, with an area director. There is a standard way of creating a group and the process to manage documents. In biweekly steering group meetings new charters, proposed documents and existing groups are evaluated.

Grid technology follows the usual evolution path of technology. We have seen Grid research already for many years, although mostly called differently: meta-computing, cluster computing, distributed computing. Early adopters showed "stunts" such as linking supercomputers over the globe. We are now at the stage of pioneers that set out for the first large scale deployments. Next phase will be stable widely used systems.

Hence, Catlett noted, we see currently a major increase in commercial interest. On the horizon are the standards that will make this possible. The standards will allow companies to start working on interoperable tools. Companies can then choose a market approach: broad, or in a specialised area.

Catlett stresses the fact that we are not there yet. There are toolkits like Globus. There are products offerings from several companies. But they do not interoperate, and are not based on standards yet. Hence he is nervous about the hype that is now being created around Grid computing. Grid computing cannot live up to these overhyped expectations, at least in the short term. Grids are about creating the future, but it will take some time before the future is there.

Sometimes, people think OGSA is the Grid standard, and that it was created by IBM and Globus outside of the Global Grid Forum. But in fact, OGSA is a set of activities that started with IBM and the Global Grid Forum. Then Globus came in, because they already have a working tool kit. There are working groups within GGF active in OGSA, and eventually, GGF standards will come out.