The Launch of the European Chapter of the Open Grid Forum (OGF)

The launch of the European Chapter of the Open Grid Forum (OGF) and the EC-funded project, OGF-Europe (http://www.ogfeurope.eu/), represents a milestone in the maturity of the Grid industry in that adoption globally is dependent upon concerted outreach and adoption efforts within regions or nations. OGF-Europe is uniquely positioned to represent OGF’s global standards and best practices as well as advances in Grid technologies and usage to enterprise and research users of all types across Europe. OGF-Europe is specifically aimed at leveraging the significant EU investments, which have been made over the last decade to architect, build, and manage Grid infrastructures and applications. The project will seek to increase up-take not just in research, but also in commercial and small-medium enterprises.

OGF-Europe provides OGF with a number of very focused activities around the mobilisation of end-user communities that are exploring Grid adoption. The ability for standards bodies to act in co-ordination with market requirements is an important factor in speeding up adoption. OGF-Europe will focus on the essence of mobilisation and integration of Grid communities with the intent of delivering actionable and sustainable results. Through a dynamic work plan that provides the mechanisms for achieving near-term solutions to known Grid adoption challenges resulting in well-defined best practices and global standards, OGF-Europe will seek to accelerate standards development and adoption across Europe.

OGF-Europe is playing a key role in bringing business and research communities together with the aim of ensuring that standardization is catered to real-world user needs. To support effective engagement with enterprises, OGF-Europe has established an Industry Expert (IE) Panel led by Dr Fabrizio Gagliardi from Microsoft. Much of the focus of the IE Panel will be on the next wave of Grid, addressing issues such as: cloud computing, data management and virtualization. EU and global industry experts will evaluate these issues along with EU case studies of cloud computing.

About OGF-Europe
Partners Mobilising & Integrating Communities on Grids,  Standards & Best Practices across Europe: Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain; European Chapter of the Open Grid Forum EEIG (OGF.eeig), UK; Atos Origin, Spain; Institute of Graphics and Parallel Processing of Johannes Kepler University Linz (GUP), Austria; l'Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), France, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italy; Intellect, UK; Oxford e-Research Centre, UK; Poznan Supercomputing & Networking Centre (PSNC), Poland; Telefónica I+D, Spain.
OGF-Europe FAQ: http://www.ogfeurope.eu/index.php/ogfeuropefaq

OGF-Europe’s First International Event at OGF23, 2-6 June, Barcelona, Spain
OGF-Europe’s first international event is set within OGF23, 2-6 June 2008, hosted by Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), which leads OGF-Europe.  “OGF23 is where the Grid community will come together again to discuss and learn about standards, applications, and use cases in distributed environments, be it enterprise architectures, compute and data grids, virtualization, utility clouds, or Web2.0 communities”, says Wolfgang Gentzsch, Chair of the OGF23 Program Committee. “This event is especially important for Europe, where Grids are riding significant momentum, and an opportunity to showcase the technological developments taking shape in EU research and commercial settings. OGF23 is a prime opportunity to engage with an international audience at one of the largest and most important Grid events taking place this year in Europe”, Gentzsch adds.

The OGF-Europe Tutorial Programme features sessions designed to transfer practical skills in implementing and deploying Grid solutions. Current and upcoming OGF standards have made the interoperable submission, monitoring and controlling of computational activities in Grid systems a feature of Grid middleware. The Tutorial on Thursday 5 June, 3.45-5.15, Managing Computational Activities on the Grid – from Specifications to Implementation targets Grid developers and Grid advanced users. Tutorial participants will gain new knowledge on a series of key specifications: BES (Basic Execution Service), JSDL (Job Submission Description Language), HPC Extensions (High-Performance Computing), GLUE (an information model for Grid resources, advanced draft). Participants will learn about the on-going implementation work by three leading European middleware providers: ARC, gLite, and UNICORE. Specific takeaways include insight into BES, JSDL, HPC extensions & GLUE standards, application scenarios, deign choices and technical challenges for the transition from specifications to implementation.

The Tutorial on Friday 6 June, 11.00-12.30, is dedicated to Managing Files & Storage Resource Manager (SRM) Interface. SRM is an OGF standard interface for middleware components that provide dynamic space allocation and file management of shared storage components on the Grid. The Tutorial will show application scenarios in both enterprise and academic settings, highlighting the advantages of adopting SRM and offering a valuable overview of the implementations available. SRM is a common abstraction layer that provides a workable interface that can be immediately used by Grid projects to resolve interoperability issues between storage systems.

OGF-Europe is also hosting a day-long Community Outreach Seminar on Digital Repositories, exploring how stakeholders can work towards reliable and interoperable DR infrastructures that satisfy the requirements of an ever broader community of users. Specific domains showing the benefits of Grid and user case studies on Earth Sciences, Space Science, Natural Resource Science, and the Humanities. Additionally, the Seminar addresses key horizontal issues, such as data/metadata interoperability in specific domains;  software architectures; data sharing policies as well as the promotion of open standards for DR Infrastructures with case study examples and challenges.