Well, GridWorld has come and gone, and I would classify the overall experience as positive for the Grid community. With the GGF, EGA and Globus communities (the first two now united under the OGF banner) all under one roof, I believe everyone began to understand (if they didn't already) just much synergy exists, and how harnessing this synergy will advance every community's specific goals. In addition, the OGF sent a strong message that it is committed to leading the standards charge, and implored the overall Grid community to contribute as much as possible to help the organization take Grid to the next level.

If, however, I had to point to one negative aspect of the conference, it would be in the planning and running of the conference as a whole. There were many discrepancies between the Web and print schedules, which led me to miss all but the end of Thursday's closing keynote, caused one presenter to give his talk twice in a row in two separate rooms and, perhaps most annoyingly to many attendees, left a large number lunchless on Monday afternoon. Of course, with the countless sessions across three tracks going on at any given time, I guess some mistakes were inevitable. Whatever happens with the conference next year, I have to believe special attention will be paid to accuracy, even if it means a significant reduction in the number of things going on, which apparently can be a double-edged sword.

Even with missing the Thursday keynote, though, I was able to take something away from the day when I caught up with eBay's Paul Strong. Speaking on his views of the conference, Strong seemed to agree with some of my thoughts, although he provided some inside insight by pointing out that getting people together in a big setting like GridWorld isn't always the best means to an endpoint. A lot of work, he said, goes on throughout the year, and these events often best serve the purposes of synchronization and networking. This would explain the seemingly nothing that was accomplished during a standards summit I attended during the show. Assuming Strong's point is accurate, I have to believe the involved parties will begin to make progress as the year progresses.

We also spoke a little about commercial adoption of Grid computing, and Strong again emphasized how increased adoption, and the resulting move of Grid technologies from in-house to commercial-off-the-shelf, will benefit everyone, including eBay. He noted a few factors that could lead to this increase in adoption, including more enterprises going public with their Grid successes, and "turning the adoption discussion on its head." Strong believes it's important not to try and sell "Grid computing," but rather convince people that their distributed datacenters are, in fact grids -- only without the Grid middleware to scale them horizontally and maximize management capabilities. Furthermore, Strong echoed a sentiment I heard several times over the course of the week: Sell the problem-solving capabilities of Grid computing, not the technology!

Finally, we spoke about the evolution of Grid 2.0 and how adding yet another term to the lexicon will affect the marketplace. Although he acknowledges that Grid 2.0 is interesting in terms of taxonomizing the technology's maturity, Strong doesn't believe it's doing much to persuade IT decision makers, who already are overwhelmed with buzz words. Pretty much, Strong noted, Grid 2.0 - - as a term -- further illustrates an obsession by the IT community to find either an acronym or a single word to capture an entire idea, no matter how complex it might be. If you still haven't read my Q&A with Strong from last week's GRIDtoday, I'll point to it one last time: http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/875717.html.

I'll end my discussion of GridWorld by pointing out that we provided three days of exclusive coverage in GRIDwire, which featured articles by Wolfgang Gentzsch, Ian Foster and Malcom Atkinson (to name a few), as well as a Q&A with IBM's Ken King and my comments from day one and days two and three, respectively. While many of the news announcements from last week are included in this week's GRIDtoday, and I've included a few of the feature articles (and will run a couple more next week), I would suggest, if you haven't already, visiting the GRIDwire site and checking out the breadth of the coverage. In addition, the GridWorld photo gallery is currently online in the photo gallery section of GRIDtoday.

To end, as you probably noticed, this week's issue features a preview of next week's EGEE'06 conference in Geneva, Switzerland. We've got Q&As with EGEE project director Bob Jones and Grid Computing Now! manager Ian Osborne, both of whom offer unique insights as to what's going on with their respective projects. We'll be looking to provide more coverage of EGEE'06 as it takes place next week, as well as follow-up coverage in the following weeks, so stay tuned.