Meeting Report for OGF21 Seattle
14-19 October, 2007
Prepared by Richard Hughes-Jones – GridNet ID: 102
The University of Manchester
R.Hughes-Jones@Manchester.ac.uk
I attended the following Working Group and Research Group Sessions:
1 GFSG
The steering group meeting was held on Sunday afternoon 14th October.
Craig Lee from The Aerospace Corporation, introduced himself as the new OFG
President and outlined a road map of future directions for OGF. The items presented
in the Opening meeting and at the Town Hall Meeting were discussed.
The meeting continued in break-out sessions. Chris Smith led discussion in the
Standards Function. One of the main issues was to set up a process to review the
health and activity of all the working and research groups in the Standards Function.
This will include:
 emphasis on use of the OGF mailing lists,
 updating the living charter so that the work was relevant to Grids & OGF
 focusing the work on the charter,
 ensuring that the documents were produced.
There was a proposal to remove the Research Groups from the Standards Function.
While some Research Groups may have finished their work, for others this was not a
problems and did not need to be fixed!
2 OFG Opening Tuesday 15 Oct
Craig Lee introduced himself as the new OFG President and gave a very clear road
map of future directions for OGF. He outlined OGF's goal to build participation in
the research/academic community by
 promoting peer-reviewed publications related to OGF work.
 by co-locating future OGF events with established research grid conferences.
 by collaborating closely with other research organizations such as the Open
Geospatial Consortium
3 Network Mark-up Language Working Group.
The group help two sessions 11:00 on Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th October.
Session 1 had presentations describing current work being done on network modelling.
This will be input to Deliverable 1: an OGF informational document describing the
context of their work.
Session 2 focused on discussing the issues that should be included in the first schema.
.
4 Network Measurement Working Group
I chaired all three sessions – 13:30 and 15:15 on Monday 15th, and 9:00 on Tuesday
16th October. Status and update reports were given in the first session; Mark Leese
from Daresbury UK joined by telephone and gave an update of what was happening
in Europe with EGEE-II and in the UK with Gridmon that monitors the networks used
by the e-Science and Particle Physics communities in the UK. I presented the work
done by the GEANT2 JRA in extending the schemata to include end2end status
information about LightPaths.
The other two sessions were spent in detailed discussion of the Draft
Recommendation Document specifying the Schemata.
It is worth noting that the work of this group has been taken up by 29 Networks world
wide – one of OGF successes.
5 Grids and System Virtualisation Group
Both co-chairs of this group could attended by telephone, their presentations seemed
more like an introduction rather than proposals for interfaces in virtual machines or
system virtualisation concepts that could be standardised by an OGF WG.
The Co-Chairs are active but there are few members of the working group.
6 Infrastructure Area Meeting
As AD, I chaired this small meeting. After communicating the operational suggestions
from the GFSG, it reviewed the groups currently in the Infrastructure Area to
determine progress, concerns and potential problems. The groups and status are:
Grid High-Performance Networking RG (ghpn-rg)
Green
Network Mark-up Language Working Group (nml-wg)
Green
Network Measurements Working Group (nm-wg)
Green
Grid and Virtualization Working Group (gridvirt-wg)
Red/Orange – see above
Franco the other AD will shepherd the gridvirt-wg.
7 Standards All Hands Meeting
This was held at 17:00 on Tuesday 16th October. Chris Smith led the discussion of the
work in the Standards Function.
8 Grid High Performance Networking Meeting
This was held at 15:15 on Wednesday 17th October, chaired by Cees de Laat
There was a review of all the documents from the group, all seem to be making
progress.
There were presentations on:
 The status of GNI
 Progress on Network Research
 Report from the GLIF meeting
9 Firewall Issues Research Group
This was held at 17:00 on Wednesday 17th October. After some presentations
presenting the current work there was discussion on weather to put the RG on hold
and form a working group to start on a specification/work around the
"virtualization" of firewalls.
10 GridNet2 eScience Workshop
Three sessions were held on Thursday 18th October.
Members of the UK presented summaries of their work on Grid issues and at OGF. I
gave a talk on the work being done on networking by the WG and RG in the
Infrastructure area.