President's End of the Year Letter

Dear OGF Members and Participants,

As we approach the beginning of a new year, I want to take a moment and thank you for your support, reflect on some of the highlights of the past year, and make you aware of some high-priority activities in progress.

Over the course of 2007, OGF continued to deliver many high-quality specifications that detailed standards-based approaches to essential grid interoperability issues. During the recent Supercomputing '07 conference, ten separate OGF specifications or specifications in progress were demonstrated in numerous show booths. These demonstrations showed how implementations of OGF specifications enabled interoperability across heterogeneous platforms - the ultimate goal of standards.

Another very significant milestone in OGF's history was announced and highlighted during the show. Microsoft, Altair, and Platform Computing announced that OGF's High Performance Computing Basic Profile (HPC-BP) would be scheduled into future releases of their software, enabling customers to enjoy the benefits of interoperability in a multi-vendor environment. This, plus the intent to use HPC-BP in numerous national and regional production grids serving eScience communities around the world, made the announcement a significant accomplishment for OGF.

Also this year, OGF hosted its best-attended event ever during OGF20 in Manchester, UK. This event, which was co-located with the Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) User Forum, attracted nearly 1000 attendees and resulted in grid users from research and commercial verticals productively interacting with those chartered to create best practices, standards, and solutions.

Meanwhile, data challenges in both commercial and research environments prompted OGF to increase formal engagement in two high-profile activities. First, OGF signed a MoU with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) whose charter is to manage and distribute large quantities of geospatial data (i.e., anything that goes on a map). This initiative, along with a joint initiative with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) around developing standards and best practices in data movement and data management, has brought data to the forefront of our activities moving forward.

Building on these successes in standards adoption, events, and organizational engagement across the distributed computing landscape, OGF must also strive to explore promising research topics and emerging technologies that are important to the future of grids and our community. Clearly, data interoperability, virtualization, Web 2.0, muliticore processors, cloud computing, and service-oriented networks are all topics highly relevant to the evolution of the grid concept. There is still much work to be done to make grid capabilities easy to adopt and effective to use across the spectrum of application domains and requirements.

Finally, I cannot stress how much of our success is based on our member's financial and technical engagement. My sincere thanks to you all once again. People from all over the world depend on OGF to provide them an open forum for engagement and open standards for interoperability. As OGF continues to deliver these essential services, we hope to enjoy your continued participation. I am delighted to be at the helm of this great organization. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or comments.

All the very best to you and your families during 2008.

Craig Lee
President, Open Grid Forum