OGF eScience Function

1. OGF eScience Function Geoffrey Fox Board Review April 9 2008

2. Some Principles and Issues • Aim at Relevance and Excellence exploiting loose flexible interactions with Standards and Enterprise • Few activities will lead to new standards but loose coupling of eScience and Standards will be mutually fruitful (e.g. paper on clouds by myself and Jha/Merzky) • Many activities jointly interesting and best jointly organized by Enterprise and eScience • Problem to address: Attract more of eScience community. • I believe one must aim at the leaders in field as these ensure excellence. • Current attendance levels due partly to view that OGF is a standards organization (Forum part not common perception) but dominantly • “Grids are stale” and in US “Grid funding” small and “(Tera)Grid directions” unclear • Important to attract more software providers

3. General Approach • A few key community/research groups such as GIN and (soon) Clouds • Major part of program is event community call and special workshops organized by leadership • Special series like software provider forum but need large attendance to work • Difficult to fit into current events; European events have enough attendance • Disseminate through web-based record and special issues of journals. • Currently 8 submissions to general OGF 2008 special issue • Previously had special issues on portals (3), workflow, GIS and provenance with a total of 80 published papers. • Do approximately one special issue per year

4. OGF Special Issue 2008Concurrency&Computation: Practice&Experience • Reliability in Grid Computing Systems • The HPC Basic Profile and SAGA: Standardizing Compute Grid Access in the Open Grid Forum • Accessing RDF(S) Data Resources in Service-based Grid Infrastructures • WS-Naming: Location Migration, Replication, and Failure Transparency Support for Web Services • Profiles for Conveying the Secure Communication Requirements of Web Services • A General Encoding Framework for Representing Network Measurement and Topology Data • Interoperation of World-Wide Production e-Science Infrastructures • Using Clouds to Provide Grids Higher-Levels of Abstraction and Explicit Support for Usage Modes

5. Immediate Steps • Continue current approach with a focus on clouds that is very interesting to many from all OGF functions • This requires careful planning which is ongoing • Note “data area” is also interesting to many but mature field (like workflow) and OGF not well regarded in this area • Clouds are new and OGF can lead and define attractive activities that will draw people • Expect to hold USA based special workshops starting in September • Possible difficulties • Clouds did not come from Grid community • Quite a bit of competition; CCC from CRA and activities at Grid conferences (HPDC will have a Cloud panel) • Some think Clouds are “just Grids re-hyped” • OGF does not have strong contacts with leaders of Cloud initiatives or virtualization

6. What can OGF Central do? • Event management (OGF top class here). • Following up to ensure good documentation of workshops etc. (as Julie did for Cloud BOF) • More resources on web pages would be useful although current web site much improved and quite good • Need "Information" specialist to gather and organize material (i.e. need domain experts) • Could OGF Europe fund? • Good technology like streaming A/V (not access grid) and other event technologies could offer premium service • Gridforge optimized for archival capabilities like version control etc. and not used much by eScience • Instead need technologies with optimization to information dissemination • e.g. could have a Google gadget that one can download to get latest OGF feeds • Help needed to contact Cloud and virtualization experts

7. Some Observations • Pursuing unrealistic goals leads to • Too little attention being paid to important activities that could succeed • Underestimate of success of OGF • Alignment of functions does not require attention except to decrease attention currently given to alignment • Forced alignment responsible for some of current problems • OGF should aim for excellence and relevance in its 3 functions and not force common mechanisms/collaborations for success • The event PC model should insure tactical coherence of functions; further measures not needed? • Interacting with members of different functions in corridors and technical meetings is very positive and part of “OGF advantage” • The majority of people I talk with, expect OGF to fold in next year or so • Grid technology viewed as too complicated and not sustainable • OGF cannot survive significant perturbation in near term • OGF Europe is not well aligned with needs and directions of OGF? • It embodies the old view of Grids and OGF. Can we change? • e.g. Good for OGF-Europe to pay full time group chair and information expert working for OGF – not for a particular technology group in Europe