GGF 16, February 2006, Athens
Report from Steven Newhouse, University of Southampton
Grid Forum Steering Group Meeting
An all day meeting of the GGF Area Directors and the GGF leadership to review and discuss internal activity. This meeting was primarily concerned with the progress of the merger with the Enterprise Grid Alliance.
Grid Interoperability Now (GIN)
Following on from its initial meeting at Supercomputing 2006 in Seattle, the GIN group held a day long workshop at GGF16. This meeting reviewed the areas that had been set up following the initial meeting – Jobs, Authorisation, Data & Information Services. This was the first opportunity to have a face to face meeting to review progress. As the coordinator of activity in the jobs area I provided an update of progress to date and future plans – to build islands of interoperation around pre WS-GRAM, WS-GRAM, and BES
& JSDL.
OGSA Round Table
The Open Grid Services Architecture working group was planning its future strategy in which specifications it would use to build its architecture. During a round table session I presented a strategy based on the pragmatic use of widely adopted web service specifications. This was based upon the needs of both OMII-UK and the UK e-Science programme.
Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA)
Reviewed the document and contributed to the discussions relating to the document that took place over several sessions.
Interoperability Fests – Bird of a Feather Meeting
One of the issues starting to face GGF is how to verify implementations relating to the specifications being developed by the working groups. Various options were discussed but no concrete actions came out of the meeting as no one present was willing to lead the activity.
Basic Execution Service (BES) Working Group
As co-chair of the working group I led a review of the latest draft of the specification and the discussions that followed.
Applications Area Meeting
As one of the Applications Standards Area Director I led this meeting that reviewed activity taking place in the working and research groups active in the area. We decided to plan a workshop for the next meeting that would strengthen the links between activity in the Applications area and other standards activity.
OMII-UK

I ran a workshop describing the software components being produced by the OMII-UK consortium. Presentations were provided by partners within OMII-UK and the managed programme. There were also several closed meetings with the OMII-UK management team.