Mark's note and today's TSC discussion lead me to resend something I penned during our original round of agenda- and document-bashing:
The terms "grid" and "grid computing" have a long, storied, and somewhat checkered past. The term has gotten quite muddy. Articles like
http://weblog.infoworld.com/gridmeter/archives/2006/07/a_broader_scope.html
draw this in sharp relief.
We should take advantage of this inflection point to recapture the mindshare around "grid", by setting and stating goals crisply.
I assert that grid computing is utility computing, on a range of hardware, in a range of architectures - it's not just HPC computing, stealing cycles from one another's supercomputers any more. (Nor is it, really, about cycle recovery from desktops or embarrassingly parallel applications like SETI@Home. Those are interesting, they got the term out into the marketplace of ideas, but we're not going to be developing organizational strategy around those.)
Grid computing is about these things:
- infrastructure virtualization - resource pooling & sharing - self monitoring & improvement - dynamic resource provisioning - highest quality of service
OGF's goals and the TSC's strategic roadmap need to capture all this.
I'll suggest again (probably for the last time :-) that this list, or something like it, is a good place to start our highest-level discussions of what OGF is trying to do. Work can be segmented, models built, use cases partitioned and gaps found by picking and choosing from these items as needed. Obviously, not all of our potential grid segments or archetypical use cases need all of these - but I think that every stakeholder cuts through several of them, so it might be an interesting place to start forging our message (both marketing and technical). Best, chris