Dear PC
members,
I've discussed
this industry track within the Grid Computing Now project and we've come up
with some thoughts on the general outline of the event. These seem to be
in line with what we discussed on the first telcon. I'd like to take
this further on tomorrow's call, as I'm sure you will have thoughts
to add. I think we need to agree on an outline at this level quickly
so that we can then progress to a more detailed plan.
1.
Audience. We want to target IT leaders who are potential users of Grid and
related technologies. The aim is to raise awareness of what these
technologies can do for business now, rather than to sell a grand vision
(although that can be there in the background).
2.
Marketing. We believe the industry track needs to be marketed as
a separate component of the main event. We don't mean
this in the way of establishing a separate annual event a la GridWorld,
but the industry track should have a name of its own and people should
be able to register easily for just the days of the industry track. This
target audience is unlikely to be interested in the other activities of
OGF20 (at least, not yet...). E.g. we could call the track "Grids Mean
Business", hosted by OGF & GCN; the registration page would have "Grids Mean
Business" as one option for registration (and this would register people for the
relevant days of OGF20).
3. Setting the
scene. We need an opening presentation (or set of
presentations) that give an introduction
to modern computing infrastructures (Virtualisation, SOA and Web Services,
Grid), introducing the key concepts and their relationships.
We should stress that we're not purist about the meaning of "Grid"'; we use
whatever works to solve business problems.
4. We need a mixture of case studies and
discussion panels, covering issues such as: utility computing; data centre
grids; software as a service (perhaps leading to Grid markets), collaborative
Grids (e.g. supply chains). These should focus on solving business
problems. Ideally the case studies will cover several sectors so that we
can market the event within those sectors.
5. Then we need to cover issues of scaling,
leading to the challenges of truly large-scale resource
managment.
I look forward to
hearing your suggestions and comments.
Best
wishes,
Dave Berry
Technology Lead, Grid Computing
Now!
National e-Science Centre, 15 South College Street
Edinburgh, EH8
9AA
+44 131 651 4039