In my role as executive director of OGF, I get questions all the time about grid technology, about OGF’s relevance, and about the future of grids. At OGF’s next event, OGF22 (Feb. 25-28 in Cambridge, Mass.), we plan to have wide discussion and lively debate over the latest round of tough questions being asked of our community, including:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, chairman emeritus of the IBM Academy, will discuss this during his keynote entitled, "Cloud Computing, Grids and the upcoming Cambrian Explosion in IT." This keynote will be followed by a Birds-of-a-Feather session led by Geoffrey Fox, where plenty of questions and answers about clouds and grids will be discussed.

"Are OGF published standards ready for prime-time adoption or do they just have narrow, academic applications?" 

Participants will get to decide for themselves at the Specification Adoption sessions for numerous OGF specs like High-Performance Computing Basic Profile (HCP-BP), Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA), Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA), and a host of others. Open source and commercial software developers can meet with specification authors and others with completed implementations, discuss how the specification can be used, watch a demo, and hear lessons learned from implementation experiences.  

“Will grids ever make it big in the enterprise market?”

Charlie Catlett, founding chair of GGF and now CIO of Argonne National Lab, is going to voice his opinion in his keynote entitled “What OGF Can Do for Enterprises (A View from the CIO Office)." Charlie’s keynote will be followed by a full day of content on enterprise adoption led by SAS’ Cheryl Doninger and The 451 Group's John Barr. These sessions will undoubtedly give some useful answers to enterprises exploring or expanding their grids.

“How can we get newly computed data distributed in (near) real time?” 

An entire day at OGF22 is dedicated to discussing the emerging challenge of data movement not only in enterprise environments, but data management challenges being faced in data-centric science. This dovetails with the collaboration workshop we have with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) on integrating grids and OGC’s standard tools for cataloging, managing and processing geospatial data; perhaps opening up a whole new market for grid tools.

“Can we declare victory for grids in finance and pharma environments and move on, or are there more challenges to be overcome?” 

Experts from financial services and pharma/life science firms will discuss the good, as well as the bad and ugly, about challenges they still face during half-day workshops on both topics.

We will seek to answer these and other questions at OGF22. Program and registration details can be found at www.ogf.org on the OGF22 events page.