[wg-all] President's End of the Year Letter

[lee at aero.org]

Dear OGF Members and Participants,

As we approach the beginning of a new year, I want to take a moment 
and thank you for your support, reflect on some of the highlights of 
the past year, and make you aware of some high-priority activities in 
progress.

Over the course of 2007, OGF continued to deliver many high-quality 
specifications that detailed standards-based approaches to essential 
grid interoperability issues.  During the recent Supercomputing '07 
conference, ten separate OGF specifications or specifications in 
progress were demonstrated in numerous show booths. These 
demonstrations showed how implementations of OGF specifications 
enabled interoperability across heterogeneous platforms - the 
ultimate goal of standards.

Another very significant milestone in OGF's history was announced and 
highlighted during the show. Microsoft, Altair, and Platform 
Computing announced that OGF's High Performance Computing Basic 
Profile (HPC-BP) would be scheduled into future releases of their 
software, enabling customers to enjoy the benefits of 
interoperability in a multi-vendor environment. This, plus the intent 
to use HPC-BP in numerous national and regional production grids 
serving eScience communities around the world, made the announcement 
a significant accomplishment for OGF.

Also this year, OGF hosted its best-attended event ever during OGF20 
in Manchester, UK.  This event, which was co-located with the 
Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) User Forum, attracted nearly 1000 
attendees and resulted in grid users from research and commercial 
verticals productively interacting with those chartered to create 
best practices, standards, and solutions.

Meanwhile, data challenges in both commercial and research 
environments prompted OGF to increase formal engagement in two 
high-profile activities. First, OGF signed a MoU with the Open 
Geospatial Consortium (OGC) whose charter is to manage and distribute 
large quantities of geospatial data (i.e., anything that goes on a 
map). This initiative, along with a joint initiative with the Storage 
Networking Industry Association (SNIA) around developing standards 
and best practices in data movement and data management, has brought 
data to the forefront of our activities moving forward.

Building on these successes in standards adoption, events, and 
organizational engagement across the distributed computing landscape, 
OGF must also strive to explore promising research topics and 
emerging technologies that are important to the future of grids and 
our community.  Clearly, data interoperability, virtualization, Web 
2.0, muliticore processors, cloud computing, and service-oriented 
networks are all topics highly relevant to the evolution of the grid 
concept.  There is still much work to be done to make grid 
capabilities easy to adopt and effective to use across the spectrum 
of application domains and requirements.

Finally, I cannot stress how much of our success is based on our 
member's financial and technical engagement.  My sincere thanks to 
you all once again.  People from all over the world depend on OGF to 
provide them an open forum for engagement and open standards for 
interoperability. As OGF continues to deliver these essential 
services, we hope to enjoy your continued participation. I am 
delighted to be at the helm of this great organization. Please do not 
hesitate to contact me with any questions or comments.

All the very best to you and your families during 2008.

Craig Lee
President, Open Grid Forum
-- 
====================================================
Dr. Craig A. Lee, lee at aero.org
President, Open Grid Forum, www.ogf.org
Senior Scientist, High Performance Computing
The Aerospace Corporation,  M1-102
2350 East El Segundo Blvd.
El Segundo,  CA  90245   USA
voice: 310-336-1381
fax:   310-336-0613
http://www.aero.org

The Aerospace Corporation operates a non-profit,
federally funded research and development corporation.
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