The GGF Town Hall Meeting.
Courtesy Ann Collins, GGF
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Making the grid accessible to scientific researchers and students was a highlight of the 14th Global Grid Forum, held June 27-30 in Chicago, Illinois. This GGF event was the first to include a diverse community program featuring science and education, where members of the global scientific and grid computing community gathered to share experiences with scientific gateways and portals to grid computing resources.
"The GGF has a pretty rich tradition of involving science and supporting the different sciences," said Mark Linesch, GGF Chair. "We'd heard from a variety of people the desire to talk about portals and gateways as a way to make the grid more accessible to expert and non-expert users. Now at each GGF event we're putting together an extensive community program that explores issues specific to unique communities, and also those that cut across multiple communities."
The community sessions included over 15 presentations from scientific applications, including nanoscience, particle physics, atmospheric science and computational science. Other sessions focused on African research and education grids, education communities and the grid, space-related grid applications and supporting more new communities in GGF.
The heart of GGF14, and all GGF events, was the more than 70 working group sessions geared toward developing best practices and standards for grid computing. The GGF is the community of thousands of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardization effort for grid computing, and working for the pervasive adoption of grid computing worldwide.
The work of GGF is accomplished primarily by standards-oriented working groups and community-building research groups. The working groups develop best practices and specifications in cooperation with other leading standards organizations, software vendors, and users. Community groups represent all areas of research-astronomy, life sciences, social sciences and physics, among others-as well as industry, grid operations and technology innovation.
Learn more at the Global Grid Forum Web site.
—Katie Yurkewicz
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