Bonus Feature: Readers talk back about standards
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-Paul Strong, e-Bay
"For all of us, standards are a means to an end: interoperability that enables integration, collaboration, choice of vendor products/components and reduced costs. As scientists, government bodies or businesses, all of us have slightly differing priorities, but ultimately we all need the benefits that standards bring. The real challenge is how to deliver relevant standards in a timely fashion. My belief is that community-driven standards are the way forward and that standards driven through implementation are the most likely to be successful for those of us driven by quarterly and yearly results. We need interoperability and we need it fast!"
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-Mario Campolargo, European Commission
"The e-infrastructures initiative of the European Commission delivers cutting-edge ICT-based infrastructures and services to solve real-world
problems. Already today, there are more than 300 different organizations
participating in the e-infrastructures initiative, including more than
80 scientific projects. Through their work, these researchers are
helping to shape the necessary common network and service standards that will be the key to European competitiveness in the ICT domain. Such
common standards are very important. They make sure that these new
infrastructures and services will be broadly adopted in the future.
Although the e-infrastructures initiative targets the scientific community initially, common standards will ensure that eventually this technology spreads to areas with very high societal impact, such as education, health-care and environmental monitoring."
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-Craig Lee, OGF President
"The European Union is leading the way on effective grid adoption and sustainability through its policy of comprehensively supporting the entire adoption process. Projects such as the European Grid Initiative will also drive the development of policy on many levels, such as data access, resource consumption, and energy efficiency or green IT. Such usage policies will have to be monitored and enforced through standardized tooling, which OGF working groups are already pursuing. OGF looks forward to partnering with the EU at all levels-from the development of commission policies to technical implementations-to make this vision a reality."
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-Oxana Smirnova, NorduGrid
"Standards are the basis for innovation and progress in grid and are essential for grid technology take-up and exploitation. Over the last few years, NorduGrid has been involved in a large number of interoperability-related efforts. Condor, gLite, UNICORE, a number of lesser-known solutions-you name it, we tried it. The only way for users of other middlewares to use our services, and for us to reach out to such users, is to make sure our ARC middleware is interoperable with other major solutions."
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-Dieter Kranzlmueller, European Grid Initiative Design Study
"It is clear that EGI on the one hand and OGF on the other hand need to collaborate on shaping the future European Grid infrastructure. Mastering the landscape of standardization is a key element in the future sustainable European grid infrastructure. In fact, standardization is essential to the further distribution of grids as well as to interoperability between different grids, such as National Grid Infrastructures."
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-Steve Brewer, OMII-Europe
"The OMII-Europe experience has shown that the adoption of standards can potentially enable scientists and other grid users to do new things that would not have been possible with resources tied to single infrastructures. The benefit of the project-based approach is that it brings together demanding users, standards-savvy developers and competing providers focused on achievable medium-term goals. There are no simple answers as business and research communities want different degrees of security and stability."
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-Gaby Lenhart, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
"ETSI has a long history of partnership with the grid standards community, working with OGF to develop grid test cases and interoperability events in collaboration with all stakeholders. This year we will hold our 5th Grid Plugtests interoperability event, providing new opportunities for companies to test their prototypes against a standard with their partners and competitors. ETSI's mission is to succeed in involving the telecom operators and manufacturers in grid standardization. This is what is happening now in the ETSI Technical Committee GRID and we should soon have some echo of success from this committee's collaboration with OGF."
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-Erwin Laure, EGEE Technical Director
"To build a seamless European and even worldwide grid infrastructure, common standards are key. While today's users have to adopt to the specific services offered by different grid infrastructure providers, common standards will soon help offering by them a seamless infrastructure. EGEE works closely with standardization bodies such OGF and other grid infrastructure projects to ensure standards are developed according to best practices originating from operational experiences."
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-Ruth Pordes, Open Science Grid
"When common interfaces and best practices are adopted and begin to demonstrate value, standards follow.
In Open Science Grid we work with many different end-user communities to provide easy access to resources across local campus, national and international distributed infrastructures. Standards emerge from the agreed-upon services to meet the needs of these communities.
Agreeing on and documenting standards across a diverse set of projects
is a painstaking process. I much appreciate the efforts within and facilitated by the OGF and similar standards bodies to which we contribute.
As we implement our model of federated, interoperating infrastructures in the OSG, we use, and in the process validate, such standards. This was of course been instrumental in our achieving interoperability with EGEE, Pragma and TeraGrid at the international and national levels. At the regional and campus levels we work with New York State Grid, Harvard, Clemson, Fermilab and the University of Wisconsin."
-Cristy Burne, GridTalk
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
5th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting
http://www.globus.org/grid_software/data/gridftp.php
http://it-dep-fio-ds.web.cern.ch/it-dep-fio-ds/Documentation/gridftp.asp
http://dev.globus.org/wiki/GridFTP
