GGF CHAIR SHARES VIEWS ON COMMERCIAL GRID STANDARDS 09.12.03 NEWSFLASH GRIDtoday ============================================================================== Following is a response by the chair of the Global Grid Forum to the recent announcement by Oracle that it intends to set up its own consortium to define Grid-computing standards, a move that could create tension with the Global Grid Forum, of which Oracle is already a member. --- THOUGHTS ON COMMERCIAL GRID STANDARDS by Charlie Catlett, Chair, Global Grid Forum This week, Oracle announced the concept of a new Grid standards organization aimed at commercial standards, cooperating rather than competing with extant standards organizations, including Global Grid Forum. I've not yet had a chance to speak with anyone at Oracle, nor have any of the other GGF leaders, so without more information it's not yet clear what will be the focus of such a consortium. Is another Grid-related standards group needed? It depends on what the focus would be, and how that focus relates to ongoing work. We're following up with our friends at Oracle to see what they are thinking. My hope is that a dialog would show Oracle that building strong, commercially useful software and services based on open standards is something that is at the heart of the work being done by both research and commercial leaders in GGF. If, after a dialog, it turns out another standards body is necessary, then the community will have had the benefit of coordinating from the very beginning! The coverage of the Oracle announcement, and comments by pundits, has made a number of statements about the Global Grid Forum which are worth closer examination. Unfortunately, there has been a combination of inaccurate information and suggestions that there may be a conflict between the research and commercial communities who we see collaborating closely in GGF. The primary arguments in favor of a new, commercial Grid standards effort have had to do with the difference between science/research and commercial approaches to computing, coupled with a characterization of GGF as primarily non-commercial. Is GGF primarily non-commercial? 40 percent of GGF participants are from industry, and two thirds of GGF sponsoring organizations are commercial companies. There are 46 companies who are sponsor members of GGF, and at every-level of leadership within GGF there are commercial participants from many of these companies. The top contributors to our sponsor membership program this year include Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Qwest Communications , Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems. These and other software industry leaders, including Oracle, are participating in GGF, but we have a host of companies beyond the 46 sponsors that are smaller software and hardware companies eager to build Grid products and to understand the opportunities. Beyond the software and hardware companies we have participation from telecommunications providers such as Level(3), Qwest and BellSouth, as well. But GGF participation isn't just the technology "suppliers" -- we have "consumers" from industry as well. This year we have seen participants at GGF meetings from dozens of end-user companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Boeing, DaimlerChrysler, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly and Ford Motor Company. Four years ago, when we founded GGF, there were only a small number of commercial players involved, and all of them were technology companies. That has grown steadily, but we also began seeing a rapid increase in commercial participation and interest in mid 2002 as the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) effort began to converge. Earlier this year, we released the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) service specification. This enabling specification was enthusiastically received and brought a new wave of participation from commercial organizations, particularly from smaller software companies and application developers. The OGSA and OGSI working groups are co-chaired by leaders from industry (Jeff Nick from IBM, Hiro Kishimoto and David Snelling from Fujitsu) as well as from research (Ian Foster and Steve Tuecke from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago). Similarly, we have a strong set of activities developing standards for integrating databases into open Grid systems, led by both industry (Dave Pearson from Oracle) and research (Norman Paton from the University of Manchester). An examination of the more than 45 working groups and research groups in GGF will show that many of the most active groups involve this partnership between commercial and science interests. This is, in fact, the pattern we have seen in GGF -- the most successful groups are co-chaired by a person from the research sector along side a person from the commercial sector. We believe this partnering between commercial and research leaders in an open, public forum is essential to developing useful, widely accepted standards. GGF is also more than just a community of technologists developing specifications. We also have user community research groups oriented around closely related applications. A year ago we formed the Life Sciences research group which brings together bioinformatics, pharmaceutical and related application end users. This year we have formed similar end-user application groups around several scientific disciplines, including a social sciences group. We are currently in the process of forming a similar group focused on business and data center applications, which has come from discussions with Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, IBM and HP. These groups are essential in informing the standards process of the requirements of end users, and they serve as a valuable mechanism for bringing commercial and science communities together. What about the different needs of science and research applications relative to commercial, business applications? Certainly, the applications are different in many ways, just as they are in other contexts, but there are also underlying standards that are shared. Commercial and science applications both use the same Internet and Web technology, the same microprocessor and storage technologies, and the same operating systems technologies. Commercial and science Grid applications are also very similar. Whether your Grid environment is intra-company or between many companies, there are fundamental security technologies that are common. The differences are not in the underlying standards but in the use of those standards within a particular context, and those differences also exist in scientific Grids (e.g. within a single university or laboratory). It was stated in one of the articles about the Oracle announcement that GGF releases versions of software that are not backward compatible. GGF doesn't release software, but that's a fair criticism of early Grid tool developers. It's also inevitable in the early stages of software development, and one of the reasons that both research and commercial participants are investing their time and effort in developing robust standards that can carry the technology forward. It's important to separate criticisms of early software experiments, or applications of standards, from the development of the standards themselves. There is a higher tolerance for failure in science and research applications than in commercial applications. This is precisely the reason that new architectures and technologies have often been "proven" first in the research realm and then later adopted by commercial applications. The Internet, parallel computers, clustered computing, the Web and Web browsers, and Grid technology are all examples of breakthrough technologies that have begun in the research environment, moved to open standards and then applied to business applications. That is precisely what we are seeing with Grid standards and GGF, and it's been happening on a very fast timescale. The nearly 50 companies sponsoring GGF and at least 50 more who are actively engaged, are working together to develop Grid standards that will create a marketplace for Grid-enabled commercial business applications. My hope is that Oracle will help us steer this exciting effort, and it seems to me that creating a new consortium is something that runs the risk of slowing this momentum rather than channeling it. I'm looking forward to the discussion! --- GRIDtoday will closely focus on this developing story in upcoming issues, availabel online at http://gridtoday.com . For more information on the Global Grid Forum (GGF), see http://www.gridforum.org/ . _____________________________________________________________________ | | | Full background information on all sponsoring companies | | Firms marked with an * have updated their info in the last 30 days | | | | | | [ ] 921) SGI [ ] 934) Hewlett-Packard | | [ ] 527) Intel [ ] 942) Sun Microsystems | | [ ] 909) Fujitsu [ ] 943) Linux Networx | | | | | | | | For sponsorship information contact: Gridads@Gridtoday.com | |_____________________________________________________________________| @REF@ Ref: g2FL3612