Special Features:
OPEN LETTER FROM GGF CHAIR LINESCH
To members of the global Grid community,
GGF12 in Brussels is now behind us and I wanted to spend a moment talking
about the event and highlighting upcoming plans. This was my first GGF event
as chair and I came away from Brussels impressed with the caliber of the
meetings and the passion of the participants. Our plenary session, "Grids
Deployed in the Enterprise," brought together an unprecedented level of
commercial enterprise participation, representing all of the major industry
sectors. In total, we had over 550 participants from 32 countries,
representing 267 organizations. Significantly, there were 183 attendees who
attended our meeting for the first time. I want to personally welcome them to
our GGF community and to thank all of the return members.
I would also like to thank all of our keynote speakers and panelists. By
sharing their experience deploying Grids, they have helped us to better refine
requirements and inform those in the evaluation and planning stages about the
impressive results that are achievable with the technology and best practice
insights available today. Finally, our event co-sponsors played an important
role in making the event a productive environment for idea exchange and
community collaboration.
Our time in Brussels was also an opportunity to continue the critical work of
GGF around architecture and standards. We saw significant progress during the
week from each of the 32 groups that met in Brussels. These groups were
engaging on 34 separate documents that range from requirements to best
practices and standards for Grids deployments.
No matter how you look at it, we've made enormous progress over the last five
years moving Grid computing forward. I am particularly pleased with the way
the GGF community has crystallized a very compelling vision; developed
critical architectural specifications to enable this vision; and aligned with
emerging Web services standards to encourage broad industry adoption. Our
flagship architecture, OGSA, has emerged from the work of individuals from
over 60 companies and as many research organizations. During GGF12, the
community continued to make substantial progress aligning these critical
architectural concepts with the activities of our working and research groups
-- continuing the momentum as we drive aggressively toward OGSA v2.0.
As we embark on the next five years of growth and more pervasive adoption of
Grid technologies, it is important that we reflect upon and tune our plans to
capitalize on our momentum. To that end, we are embarking on a three-month
review of the overall GGF strategy and operating model. With the approval of
the Grid Forum Steering Committee and the Grid Forum Advisory Council, we have
engaged independent consultants to deliver a set of recommendations on the
most effective model to ensure the adoption of Grid computing and its
associated standards. I expect to bring forward a recommendation to the
collective GGF community in the first quarter of 2005.
Finally, I would like to again thank everyone for their participation in GGF12
and their active engagement in our community. I enjoyed meeting everyone, and
really appreciated the suggestions and feedback I received during the week. I
will continue to keep you updated on our activities and would solicit your
continued input on how we can together enable the next phase of growth and
adoption for Grid computing worldwide.
Best Regards,
Mark Linesch
GGF Chair
linesch@ggf.org
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