Another good OGF for NGS

OGF26 in Chapel Hill, NC, US, was fairly small by OGF standards, but it was yet another productive one.

It is interesting to have both industry and academic input, because we obviously have different priorities; this has turned out to be a positive outcome of the merger between the then GGF and EGA. Also interesting now is the interaction between the OGF and OGC who themselves have large and diverse communities - I see a potential for lots of fruitful collaborations.

Apart from our very own David Wallom being made VP of e-Research, I was made Area Director for security. This is an interesting challenge which I look forward to. For one thing, there are numerous security related projects building things for the NGS, and being able to chase them about using standards - or creating them when they don't exist - will be useful. Also interestingly, I had been given a grid security shopping list by some industry contacts.

• The Storage Resource Manager (GSM-WG) made progress with standardisation of SRM 2.2.
• More talk about digital repositories (more about this later), and a new research group is formed (DR-RG). The iRODS folks are also involved in this (iRODS being the next generation "data grid," SRB being the previous one.)
  
• "Cloud" interfaces are now being standardised, slightly unfortunately as "OCCI" (Open Cloud Computing Interface or something to that effect) which is also Oracle's C++ API. As if there were not enough XTLAs (eXtended Three Letter Acronyms).
  
• Again a fair number of interoperation activities - since the NGS is not homogeneous, interoperation is relevant to us.
• More Certification Authority stuff - a whole day of it! - of more later.

It is hard to summarise a whole conference in a few bullet points; it is maybe worth picking out a few items and looking at them in detail in some appropriate forum. As a whole I believe it is good that the NGS is engaged in standardisation and interoperation between the grids.