© 2006 Open Grid Forum Geoffrey Fox Board Review April OGF eScience Function

© 2006 Open Grid Forum Some Principles and Issues Aim at Relevance and Excellence exploiting loose flexible interactions with Standards and Enterprise Few activities will lead to new standards but loose coupling of eScience and Standards will be mutually fruitful (e.g. paper on clouds by myself and Jha/Merzky) Many activities jointly interesting and best jointly organized by Enterprise and eScience Problem to address: Attract more of eScience community. I believe one must aim at the leaders in field as these ensure excellence. Current attendance levels due partly to view that OGF is a standards organization (Forum part not common perception) but dominantly “Grids are stale” and in US “Grid funding” small and “(Tera)Grid directions” unclear Important to attract more software providers

© 2006 Open Grid Forum General Approach A few key community/research groups such as GIN and (soon) Clouds Major part of program is event community call and special workshops organized by leadership Special series like software provider forum but need large attendance to work Difficult to fit into current events; European events have enough attendance Disseminate through web-based record and special issues of journals. Currently 8 submissions to general OGF 2008 special issue Previously had special issues on portals (3), workflow, GIS and provenance with a total of 80 published papers. Do approximately one special issue per year

© 2006 Open Grid Forum OGF Special Issue 2008 Concurrency&Computation: Practice&Experience Reliability in Grid Computing Systems The HPC Basic Profile and SAGA: Standardizing Compute Grid Access in the Open Grid Forum Accessing RDF(S) Data Resources in Service-based Grid Infrastructures WS-Naming: Location Migration, Replication, and Failure Transparency Support for Web Services Profiles for Conveying the Secure Communication Requirements of Web Services A General Encoding Framework for Representing Network Measurement and Topology Data Interoperation of World-Wide Production e-Science Infrastructures Using Clouds to Provide Grids Higher-Levels of Abstraction and Explicit Support for Usage Modes

© 2006 Open Grid Forum Immediate Steps Continue current approach with a focus on clouds that is very interesting to many from all OGF functions This requires careful planning which is ongoing Note “data area” is also interesting to many but mature field (like workflow) and OGF not well regarded in this area Clouds are new and OGF can lead and define attractive activities that will draw people Expect to hold USA based special workshops starting in September Possible difficulties Clouds did not come from Grid community Quite a bit of competition; CCC from CRA and activities at Grid conferences (HPDC will have a Cloud panel) Some think Clouds are “just Grids re-hyped” OGF does not have strong contacts with leaders of Cloud initiatives or virtualization

© 2006 Open Grid Forum What can OGF Central do? Event management (OGF top class here). Following up to ensure good documentation of workshops etc. (as Julie did for Cloud BOF) More resources on web pages would be useful although current web site much improved and quite good Need "Information" specialist to gather and organize material (i.e. need domain experts) Could OGF Europe fund? Good technology like streaming A/V (not access grid) and other event technologies could offer premium service Gridforge optimized for archival capabilities like version control etc. and not used much by eScience Instead need technologies with optimization to information dissemination e.g. could have a Google gadget that one can download to get latest OGF feeds Help needed to contact Cloud and virtualization experts

© 2006 Open Grid Forum Some Observations Pursuing unrealistic goals leads to Too little attention being paid to important activities that could succeed Underestimate of success of OGF Alignment of functions does not require attention except to decrease attention currently given to alignment Forced alignment responsible for some of current problems OGF should aim for excellence and relevance in its 3 functions and not force common mechanisms/collaborations for success The event PC model should insure tactical coherence of functions; further measures not needed? Interacting with members of different functions in corridors and technical meetings is very positive and part of “OGF advantage” The majority of people I talk with, expect OGF to fold in next year or so Grid technology viewed as too complicated and not sustainable OGF cannot survive significant perturbation in near term OGF Europe is not well aligned with needs and directions of OGF? It embodies the old view of Grids and OGF. Can we change? e.g. Good for OGF-Europe to pay full time group chair and information expert working for OGF – not for a particular technology group in Europe