All about Grid and Cloud Computing: Discover the limits

From twitter:

don't ask what the cloud can do for you - ask what you can do for the cloud: define, implement and work on standards #OCCI #cloudcomputing

Today is the first day of the Open Grid Forum meeting here in Chapel Hill, NC. And during the the opening session the President of the Open Grid Forum (OGF) Craig Lee and the VP of Standards Chris Smith both stated the OCCI working group meeting as a high-light.

Currently it looks like the OCCI will be the first group to have a implementational ready API! And with this background and the collaborations to other groups like DMTF, SNIA and other standardization bodies it looks like OCCI is becoming a great thing! And for me fun to work on :-)

OCCI has currently a great momentum! And with over 130 subscribed persons on the mailing-list there is a lively and active discussion. Contributions come from individuals, large companies and end-users of the Cloud. Even some of the persons on the list have their own Wikipedia page.

If you want to join feel free to visit: http://www.occi-wg.org

Randy Bias from GoGrid posted this blog entry earlier today:

http://neotactics.com/blog/technology/the-open-cloud-is-coming

Interesting is what he says:

Already there are the inklings of people working on concrete standards including ones for cloud computing infrastructure (Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) a working group of the Open Grid Foundation (OGF)) and the portability of virtual machines (Open Virtualization Format (OVF)). Once these standards are finished and embraced by even a few clouds many customers will opt to choose cloud providers that use them, avoiding vendor lock-in and give choice to customers.

I agree with this statement and hope people will really adopt those standards. Sun is sadly enough not mentioned in the blog-entry. Although not all Cloud Vendors get nice grades .-)

Yesterday DMTF announced the Cloud Incubator. Today OGF announces the launch of OCCI. It is a great week for Cloud Standards!

The OCCI working group is currently heavily discussing stuff on the mailing-list. We are trying to create an API for 'Infrastructure as a Service' based Clouds. So please come join and help out. Many others already have and some interesting work is going on!

Today was another interesting day @OGF 25. One session hosted by Wolfgang Gentzsch and Martin Antony Walker dealt with the topic: From Grids to Clouds. Interesting ideas and thoughts what the similarities are. Also some nice ideas about which applications would favor HPC, Grid or Cloud based solutions.

My talk in this session was about the RESERVOIR project: http://www.ogf.org/OGF25/materials/1596/20090224_RESERVOIR_overview_tmetsch-v0.1.pdf

Here are some more pictures from OGF. Not the best weather today but still a nice meeting area:

Okay it's already the 4th day of the OGF. but nevertheless I wanted to blog about day 3. Not much was going on - Some interesting presentations about Cloud computing and GreenIT. Besides that networking was more or less the thing to do. Talk to people, get ideas and share thoughts about Cloud and Grid computing.

The BoF session which was hosted at OGF was a success. Over 100 people showed up and the interest was great. Overall the session went well and the Idea to create an Interface for Service Providers/Users was accepted. For more details and the slides see: http://ogf.org/gf/event_schedule/index.php?id=1567

Some more pictures from the session (view from the stage) and some pictures from lunch :-)

The next meeting of the Open Grid Forum is coming up. From March 2nd till 6th we will meet in Catania, Italy. Definitely not the worst place to be. The schedule is already up and some interesting meetings are available. Because of some shameless self promotion I want to point out to:

• Cloud Interface API BoF session
  
• From Grids to Clouds, a workshop for grid users facing the Cloud
• SAGA working group session

I will give presentations, chair groups and on top of that be very happen when I could meet you at OGF 25 :-)