NCSA NEWS

Global Grid Forum Brings Together Leaders from 28 Countries

released March 6, 2001

 

Contact
Charlie Catlett
Global Grid Forum Chair
catlett@mcs.anl.gov
217.244.2228

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS — Some 350 participants from 200 organizations and 28 countries have convened at the First Global Grid Forum (GGF-1) this week, hosted by WTCW, the Amsterdam Science and Technology Center (http://www.wtcw.nl). Global Grid Forum (http://www.globalgridforum.org) was formed in October 2000 and joins together established forums from Europe (eGrid), North America (Grid Forum), and Asia-Pacific. GGF-1 follows five highly successful workshops in the U.S. and two in Europe.

At GGF-1, 10 working groups--some which merge eGrid and Grid Forum working groups-- are meeting to debate and discuss technologies and architectures addressed in 50 white papers, or Grid Working Drafts. In addition three new working groups, focused on advanced collaborative environments, Sun's JINI technology, and protocol-based grid architectures, are gathering for the first time.

GGF-1, which involves nearly twice the participation of previous workshops, is available in streaming video over the Internet courtesy of SURFnet, the national computer network for higher education and research in the Netherlands, at www.ggf1.nl. SURFnet is one of several new Global Grid Forum sponsors who have contributed to GGF-1. Other sponsors include IBM, UniLever, Level(3), European Space Agency (ESA), the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, TeleCity, National Computing Facilities Foundation in the Netherlands (NCF), the Amsterdam Science and Technology Center, and the seven education and research centers that make up the WTCW. Also joining the Global Grid Forum sponsorship program this month are Objectivity and Intel Corporation.

"We're pleased, but certainly not surprised, to see the level of interest in grid technologies here in Europe as well as the commitment of over 100 people from North America who have come to participate," said Charlie Catlett, chair of Global Grid Forum "But perhaps a better indication of progress is to note that 85 of these 350 participants are involved in authoring white papers, and so we have a very deep base of people who are not just observing but are contributing to the work."

"Grid Forum in the U.S. was quite useful from the point of view of federal funding agencies," said Paul Messina of Caltech, chair of the Global Grid Forum Advisory Committee and former head of the U.S. Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). "It provided a gathering point for sharing solutions and for developing the standards necessary for interoperability among various projects and initiatives. Increasingly, these projects involve teams from multiple countries, and Global Grid Forum allows this model to extend in the way that the community is working globally."

About Global Grid Forum (http://www.globalgridforum.org):
Global Grid Forum is a community-initiated forum of individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or grid technologies. Global Grid Forum promotes and supports the development and use of grid technologies and applications through a dozen working groups, each focused on a diverse set of technical areas ranging from directory services to security and distributed systems performance measurement. The work of Global Grid Forum is documented through a series of white papers, or Grid Working Documents. These documents address architecture issues, technical specifications for protocols or API's, and provide detailed descriptions and surveys of current practice or implemented systems. Global Grid Forum meets three times a year, with the next workshop planned for 15-18 July in Washington, D.C.

 

Headlines Archive