Many companies already made big investments designing, setting up and provisioning cloud services, others are close to launch them (e.g., Sun Open Cloud), therefore it will take years before interoperable clouds become real. Nevertheless, the starting of this process is important as it was for Grid Computing almost ten years ago with the Global Grid Forum which became later the Open Grid Forum. It will be interesting to see which companies will support the standardization process and how much they will contribute to the effort.

• A Restful Approach to the OGSA Basic Execution Service Specification: this work is an interesting exercise on mapping a WSDL-based service interface definition into an HTTP-based one following the REST architectural style. REST has gained popularity in the last years and many Web sites are providing programmatic access to their functionalites via a RESTful interface. Among cloud services providers, this approach is popular. Therefore, I wanted to evaluate how a Grid service interface can be redesigned using a RESTful approach. Together with a colleague, we defined a mapping of the OGSA BES (Basic Execution Service) WSDL into a RESTful approach using the HTTP protocol (submitted for review to a conference, preprint available as INFN Technical Report)
• Standards-Based Job Management in Grid Systems:  several Grid middleware providers are cooperating since years to achieve a standard-based interoperability; the Open Grid Forum (OGF) is the organization providing the context for standard definition in this context; the definition and adoption process is still on-going. We have organized and described our experience in the area of definition and integration of standards for job management in a paper (submitted for review to a journal, preprint available as INFN Technical Report) .

A live web cast event was organized and the BBC will be present for the whole day.

Google, in the tradition of changing the logo for important events, did notice the relevance of all the LHC start (also amplified by the media claiming theories about the creation of a black hole…), worth to have a look: .

The Open Grid Forum accelerates grid adoption to enable business value and scientific discovery by providing an open forum for grid innovation and developing open standards for grid software interoperability. OGF provides an open forum that brings together key individuals and organizations from the grid community to align requirements; identify and remove barriers; workshop best practices that will expedite grid adoption.  As an open standards organization, OGF collaborates extensively with other standards development organizations to align with existing industry standards and develop new specifications to enable grid software interoperability.

The new mission does not mention the term Grid anymore. Since the Grid is often identified with a type of infrastructure and the related enabling middleware and since new terms are emerging for the support of the same functionality (e.g., Cloud), the OGF moves the focus to the final goal which is the support of applied distributed computing. Years back, Grid was considered the new way to do distributed computing. It was the new name for the “What” and “How”. Today, the Amazon Cloud approach (“Infrastructure as a Service”) enables new approaches, like deploying a batch system on demand (see RightGrid). That’s why probably the OGF decided to refocus the mission statement as follows:

OGF is an open community committed to driving the rapid evolution and adoption of applied distributed computing. Applied Distributed Computing is critical to developing new, innovative and scalable applications and infrastructures that are essential to productivity in the enterprise and within the science community. OGF accomplishes its work through open forums that build the community, explore trends, share best practices and consolidate these best practices into standards.

In the scope of the mission, to be considered also:

Applied distributed computing environments include everything from distributed high performance computing resources (traditional ‘Grids’) to horizontally scaled transactional systems supporting Service Oriented Architectures to Clouds, across all scales and for all application domains.

I recommend also to read the list of FAQ.

29.12.2007: (update) in the beginning of December, the National Geographic published the results of the final phase of the contest where winners from various countries competed for the top-level positions. My picture got a wonderful honorable mention.