Meeting Report for OGF20 Manchester
6-11 May, 2007
Prepared by Richard Hughes-Jones – GridNet ID: 102
The University of Manchester
R.Hughes-Jones@Manchester.ac.uk
I was very impressed by the knowledge and enthusiasm of the young members of
EEGE who manned the stands in Manchester Central. In spite of the expense, I think
it was an opportunity well taken to put the European and UK e-Science work on view
to the world Grid community.
I attended the following sessions:
1 GFSG
I attended my first steering group meeting as Area Director for Infrastructure held on
Sunday afternoon 6th May.
2 Infrastructure Area Meeting
The meeting was held at 14:00 on Monday 7th May. As AD, I co-chaired this small
meeting with Franco Travostino. 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)
Network Mark-up Language Working Group (nml-wg)
Network Measurements Working Group (nm-wg)
Grid and Virtualization Working Group (gridvirt-w)
3 Grids and System Virtualisation Group
The meeting was held at 18:00 on Monday 7th May. This was the second meeting of
the WG and the two co-chairs gave presentations covering
 some ideas of use cases.
 The concept of a virtual workspace
 Management of virtual machines in a Grid infrastructure
 The GridHypervisor project
There is some concern that the scope is too wide and initially should be focused on .
4 OFG Opening & Keynote
The Keynote on Tuesday 8th May “The Social Grid” by Tony Hay examined the
challenges in defining standards to make Grids interoperable.
5 Network Measurement Working Group Sessions
Mark Leese & I co-chaired all the NM-WG sessions at OGF 20, they were held at
10:30, 14:00 and 16:00 on Tuesday 8th May.
The first session presented updates on the NM-WG work and Alexaner Ploss from
Muster University gave a talk on “Network and Runtime
Monitoring in the edutain@grid SOA”
The other sessions continued work on the document for the version 2 Schemata.
6 Network Markup Language Working Group.
The meeting was held at 10:30 on Wednesday 9th May. As input to the informational
document there were presentations on:
 an introduction to NDL, the Network Description Language from Amsterdam
 the schema of the Network Measurements WG showing the need for network
description
 about Model vs Syntax and a review of the draft document on XML vs RDF
 a vision of RDF descriptions of grid resources, e.g. databases, files, network,
cpus, visualisation, etc
There was an invitation to everyone to provide requirements for the schemas.
It was agreed that NM-WG and NML-WG would work an a method to translate
between the existing network description schemata.
7 EU Keynote presentation
The meeting was held at 15:30 on Wednesday 9th May. Mario Campolargo gave a
very useful update and forward look at the EU PF7 calls and road map.
8 Firewall Issues Research Group
The meeting was held at 16:00 on Wednesday 9th May.
The RG documents were discussed, the first is already provided as GFD-I083 and it
was proposed to merge the other two that are in preparation into one document. Initial
thoughts on the future of the RG were discussed.
9 Grid High Performance Networking Meeting .
The meeting was held at 18:00 on Wednesday 9th May.
The presentations covered:
 Update on GUNI (Georgios Zervas)
 Enlightened Computing Update: An HD-class example (Jon MacLaren)
 SIP protocol for Grid Networks (Aldo Campi)
 Research Challenges for Optical Grid Networks (Marc De Leenheer)
 Introducing EC-GIN: Europe-China Grid InterNetworking (Sven Hessler)
10 Gridnet2 meeting
On Thursday morning from 9:00-11:00 the author attended the GridNet2 Advisory
Board meeting at the University of Manchester.