Open Grid Forum

Open Grid Forum
Formation	2006
Type	Standards Development Organization
Purpose/focus	Developing standards for Grids & Creating Grid communities
Region served	Worldwide
OGF President	Craig A. Lee
Website	www.ogf.org

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGSA, OGSI, and JSDL standards were created by the OGF. The OGF models its creations of open standards on the IETF.

Organization

The OGF has two principal functions (plus an administrative function) being the development of Standards relating to Grids, and the building of Communities within the overall Grid community (including extending it to encompass wider participation from both academia and industry). Each of these function areas is then divided into Groups of three types: Working Groups with a generally tightly defined role (usually producing a standard), Research Groups with a looser role bringing together people to discuss developments within their field and generate use cases and spawn working groups, and Community Groups (restricted to community function area, not yet very common, this description needs work).

Three meetings are organized per year, divided (approximately evenly after averaging over a number of years) between North America, Europe and East Asia. (See schedule of events for more information). Many working groups organize face-to-face meetings in the interim.

Standards

The following major standards have been produced by OGF:

• GridFTP: Extensions to the File Transfer Protocol for high-speed, secure, and reliable data transfer.
• Grid Laboratory Uniform Environment (GLUE), is a technology-agnostic information model for a uniform representation of Grid resources.
• SAGA: The Simple API for Grid Applications describes an interface for high-level Grid application programming.
• Open Grid Services Architecture: The OGSA describes an architecture for a service-oriented grid computing environment for business and scientific use.
• DRMAA: Distributed Resource Management Application API is a high-level API specification for the submission and control of jobs to one or more Distributed Resource Management Systems (DRMS) within a Grid architecture.
• Job Submission Description Language: An extensible XML specification for the description of simple tasks to non-interactive computer execution systems. The specification focuses on the description of computational task submissions to traditional high-performance computer systems like batch schedulers.
• CDDLM: Configuration Description, Deployment, and Lifecycle Management Specification is a standard for the management, deployment and configuration of Grid Service lifecycles or inter-organization resources.
• Resource Specification Language
• GridRPC: Grid Remote Procedure Call designs OGF recommendations for a grid-enabled, remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism.
• DFDL: Data Format Description Language for the modeling of general text and binary data.

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

In addition to technical standards, the OGF Document series comprises over 70 community-developed informational and experimental documents.

Implementations

The first version of the DRMAA API was implemented in Sun's Grid engine and also in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's program Condor. The separate Globus Alliance maintains an implementation of some of these standards through the Globus Toolkit. The current release of UNICORE is based on the OGSA architecture and JSDL.

History

The concept of a forum to bring together developers, practitioners, and users of distributed computing (or grid computing) technologists was discussed at a "Birds of a Feather" session in November 1998 at the annual SCxx supercomputing conference. Based on positive response to the idea during this BOF, Ian Foster and Bill Johnston convened the first Grid Forum meeting at NASA Ames in June 1999, drawing roughly 100 people, mostly from the US. A group of organizers nominated Charlie Catlett (from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago) to serve as the initial chair, confirmed via a plenary vote was held at the 2nd Grid Forum meeting in Chicago in October 1999. With extensive advice and assistance from IETF leaders, OGF established a standards process that is based heavily on the Internet Standards Process of the IETF. OGF is managed by a steering group whose members are selected by the community through a nomcom process that IETF uses, as outlined in RFC 2282.

During 2008 groups similar to Grid Forum began to organize in Europe (called eGrid) and Japan. Discussions among leaders of these groups resulted in combining strength to form Open Grid Forum which met for the first time in Amsterdam in March 2001. GGF-1 in Amsterdam followed five successful Grid Forum meetings. Catlett served as GGF Chair for two 3-year terms and was succeeded by Mark Linesch (from Hewlett Packard) in September 2004.

At GGF-18 (the 23rd gathering of the forum, counting the first five GF meetings) in September 2006 GGF became Open Grid Forum (OGF) based on a merger with an industry group named Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA).

See also

• Grid computing
• Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI)
• Open Cloud Computing Interface
• Data Format Description Language (DFDL)

External links

• Open Grid Forum home page
• BEinGRID