| These organizations are responsible for refining the grid standardization process and defining the best practice guidelines for the scientific and industry usage of grid. The most prominent among such organizations is Global Grid Forum (GGF). There are other standards organizations working closely with GGF in this process, including OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force), and DMTF (the Distributed Management Task Force). [2] GGF is mainly working in the Grid arena while others have more broad-based programs covering other parts of the computing industry such as network, resource, business, and Internet standards. For example, W3C is working on the standardization of Web and Web- related technologies, including Web services, eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and Semantic Web. GGF is working closely with these organizations in defining the grid standards aligned with the other open standard processes and providing inputs and requirements to other standards organizations. Global Grid Forum (GGF) The GGF [3] was established a couple of years ago as a public community forum for the discussion of grid technology issues. The GGF enables a means of coordinating Grid Computing technology efforts, promoting reuse and interoperability, and sharing the results. As of now, there are more than 400 organizations involved with GGF from around the world. This includes scientific research institutions, universities, and commercial organizations. The GGF's primary objective is to promote and support development, deployment, and implementation of grid technologies and applications via creation and documentation of best practices ”specifications, use cases, architecture, and implementation guidelines. The basic goals of the GGF are to: -
Create an open process for the development of grid agreements and specifications -
Create grid specifications, architecture documents, and best practice guidelines -
Manage and version controls the documents and specifications -
Handle intellectual property policies -
Provide a forum for information exchange and collaboration -
Improve collaboration among the people involved with grid research, grid framework builders, grid deployment, and grid users -
Create best practice guidelines from the experience of the technologies associated with Grid Computing -
Educate on advances in the grid technologies and share experiences among the people of interest The organization consists of different work areas, with research groups and work groups for each area. The work groups are the main activity centers of the GGF. These work groups are created to address a research, implementation, and operational area related to the infrastructure for building any "grid." The major work areas of the GGF are as follows : -
Application and programming environments -
Architecture -
Data -
Information systems and performance -
Peer-to-peer: Desktop grids -
Scheduling and resource management -
Security As of today, one of the major activities in GGF that is attracting the grid community is the architecture model based on the open standard Web service architecture, called Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA). A detailed discussion on this emerging standard is a necessity which we will undertake in a subsequent chapter. With open standards as the foundation and software integration, OGSA has emerged as the core grid technology for future resource sharing, especially with the newly added commercial dimension to Grid solutions. |
