Boas Betzler started in 1998 the porting of Linux on an IBM mainframe in the IBM Böblingen Lab. and convinced different groups and persons of Linux. Now he is active in the development of e-utilities.

First he discussed the infrastructure requirements. What one needs to build are in the base a robust runtime environment, the management of life cycle and state. The next level contains abstract resource models, dynamic discovery and access. The third level contains Reliability, Availability and Serviceability features as well as security, fail over and data replication. These are well known features from the commercial data processing and are entering the scientific computing now. On top one wants to build value add.

On the side of the standards evolution, he started with the networking. There have been islands of loosely coupled networks, in the communications we saw the Internet, TCP/IP and e-mail. The next step was the information, world wide web (html, http, xml), in the operating systems Linux was coming. On the applications side one has to mention the Web Services (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) and in the last step the distributed computing. Here the Grid and OGSA are the main topics.

The base of the Grid Architecture is vendor dependent, for example IBM eServer, storage systems and networks. On the other side one finds non IBM systems like Sun, HP, Dell, Microsoft, Cisco and all the other vendors. The next level contains the WebServices Run-time and then on top of it OGSA. The next level is represented by autonomic functions, for example e-utilities, eWLM, EIM etc, and Middleware for example Tivoli, Data Synapse, Platform, United Devices, Entropia and the Globus project. On top we find the applications from different areas. Boas Betzler mentioned the scientific and technical computing, e-commerce, xSP (x Service Providers) and others. Additionally there is a common GUI for end users and the administration staff.

The Global Grid Forum has the working areas Data (realising an abstract access to data), Peer-to-Peer, Architecture, Security, Applications and Programming Environments, Information Systems and Performance, and Scheduling and Resource Management. Actually, the Forum has about 900 members.

In the Service Model the interface is separated from access and implementation. The service implementation lies in an execution container. Additionally there is a service compensation layer and native platform functions. He concluded that Open Standards are not a religion but they are business. They like XML, OGSA, SOAP, WSDL and Linux allow to build portable applications and add-ons over a broad spectrum of computer architectures and operating systems.