 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
|
Breaking News -
General:
globusWORLD 2004 Issues
Preliminary Program
With planning in full swing for the second GlobusWORLD, conference
organizers
have released the advance program and announced several keynote speakers. The
annual event centers on the Globus Toolkit, a suite of software and services
that are central to the growing field of Grid computing.
GlobusWORLD 2004 will be held Jan. 20-23 in San Francisco. Preliminary
program and other details are at www.globusworld.org. This year's
conference builds on successes of the first GlobusWORLD, which attracted more
than 450 attendees, one-third of whom were from the commercial sector. The
conference will deliver a content-rich three days with four concurrent
sessions of presentations, training and discussions for users at all levels,
with an additional day devoted solely to workshops on topics such as the
Grid's use in financial services, the life sciences and medical imaging.
Sessions will be led by users, designers, developers and vendors from the
research, industry and academic sectors. They will address strategic issues
for enterprise planners, such as return on investment, business case and
strategic value of the Grid. In-depth technical issues -- such as security,
resource management, data access and integration, autonomic computing,
monitoring and discovery, service management, provisioning, meta-scheduling,
workflow and Web services -- will be addressed for architects, developers and
deployers.
The Globus Toolkit provides key enabling software and services that let
people
share computing power, databases and other tools securely online across
corporate, departmental, institutional and geographic boundaries without
sacrificing local autonomy. It has been deployed broadly worldwide for both
science and industry and has developed a strong community of contributors and
users.
"Our conference is the only one organized by principals in the Globus
Alliance, which develops the Grid's foundational middleware," said Ian Foster,
a primary organizer of the event. "We have seen another large surge of
interest in Grid since the June release of Globus Toolkit 3.0, which is the
first full-scale implementation of the Open Grid Services Infrastructure
(OGSI). GlobusWORLD attendees will get the latest and best content -- straight
from the source. The program has a good mix of speakers from industry and
academia, with the sessions focusing on Globus Toolkit-based technology and
solutions."
That latest version of the toolkit has been redesigned using the new
OGSA/OGSI
specifications, which are making Grids easier to design and implement than
ever before by using popular Web service standards. Among the other
technologies to be featured at GlobusWORLD 2004 are security, resource
management, data access and integration, autonomic computing, monitoring and
discovery, service management, provisioning, meta-scheduling, workflow and Web
services. In addition to describing the currently released software, the
conference will feature considerable discussion of future Grid standards and
Globus Toolkit implementation plans. The first set of keynote speakers -- with
more to be announced later -- includes Foster, leader of the Globus Alliance
at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, a central figure
in development of the Globus Toolkit and definition of the Open Grid Services
Architecture (OGSA). Another keynote is Larry Smarr, director of the
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, (Cal
IT(2)). Smarr, a pioneer in prototyping a national information infrastructure
to support academic research, governmental functions, and industrial
competitiveness, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the
President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. Keynotes representing
e-Business include Mark Linesch, vice president of Hewlett-Packard's Adaptive
Enterprise Program, and Steve Yatko, Credit Suisse First Boston's global chief
technology officer for securities IT, who is one of the Computerworld Premier
100 IT Leaders for 2003.
Many of the talks, panels and sessions will focus on real-world experiences
of
Grid deployment, including e-Business and Enterprise Grid deployments. "Globus
Insider" sessions will feature a mix of architect-level overviews and in-depth
developer-level content on all aspects of the Globus Toolkit 3.0. A new Globus
Development Laboratory will let attendees interact with the toolkit's
developers.
Use of Globus Toolkit in the financial services industry will be a hot
topic
at the conference, according to Duncan Johnston-Watt, Chief Technology Officer
at Enigmatec Corporation, a GlobusWORLD sponsor. "Globus Toolkit 3.0
epitomizes the convergence of Grid computing and Web Services," he said.
"Within eighteen months Enterprise Service Grid will be mainstream, with Wall
Street taking the lead. For any Wall Street firm that fails to Grid-enable
their infrastructure in response to the massive structural changes underway in
the financial services industry, it will put at risk their long-term
viability."
Other GlobusWORLD corporate sponsors to date include Hewlett-Packard, IBM
Grid
Computing, inSORS Integrated Communications, and Intel. Tabor Communications
-- publisher of HPCwire and GridToday -- is the event's Premier Media Sponsor.
Other media sponsors are ClusterWorld and Linux magazines. Research sponsors
include Argonne National Laboratory, the Information Sciences Institute at the
University of Southern California, the GRIDS Center (part of the NSF
Middleware Initiative) and Cal IT(2). The Globus Toolkit's open source, open
architecture software and services have been deployed broadly worldwide for
both science and industry, attracting a strong community of contributors and
users. The New York Times has called Globus Toolkit "the de facto standard for
Grid computing" and praised the "far-sighted simplicity" of its Grid services
architecture. MIT Technology Review named it one of Ten Technologies That Will
Change the World. Other recent acclaim for the toolkit includes an R&D 100
Award and the Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Tech
Transfer.
|