News

Contact: Anke Kamrath, SDSC, kamratha@sdsc.edu, 858-534-5140

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO - The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) will host the 3rd Grid Forum meeting (GF-3) ( http://www.sdsc.edu/GridForum/) March 22-24, 2000 at the Price Center Ballroom on the UCSD ( http://www.ucsd.edu) campus. Participants must register no later than March 7, 2000. Registration information is available at the GF-3 Web site.

Grid Forum ( http://www.gridforum.org) is a community-initiated forum of individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or "grid" technologies. Grid Forum focuses on the promotion and development of Grid technologies and applications via the development and documentation of "best practices," implementation guidelines, and standards with an emphasis on rough consensus and running code.

These "Grid" technologies are critical to such activities as the PACI National Technology Grid , being developed through NPACI's Metasystems efforts ( http://www.npaci.edu/Thrusts/Metasystems/) in collaboration with the National Computational Science Alliance; NASA's Information Power Grid; the Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative; and other activities worldwide. Grid Forum is organized in nine working groups focusing on such areas as security, scheduling, and Grid user services.

"This workshop is an opportunity for the scientific community to come together and find common ground in computational practices, as well as to discuss the continued development of computational infrastructure," said Anke Kamrath, GF-3 organizer and SDSC's associate director for distributed computing. "Grid Forum will help steer NPACI's efforts, as well as those of similar programs, toward the long-term goals of the Grid, to impact, influence, and help shape the Grid into the sophisticated, seamless system we envision. As importantly, having people from various grid projects come together will promote interoperability at the technical level and collaboration at the human level."

The Grid Forum evolved out of a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session at the Supercomputing '98 ( http://www.supercomp.org/) conference, in an effort to start up a dialogue on the development of technology grids. GF-1 was held at NASA Ames in June 1999 and at this meeting the initial working groups were formed. At GF-2, held at Northwestern University in Chicago, initial working group charters were developed and an operating structure for Grid Forum was developed. At GF-3, working groups will spend most of their time making progress toward the objectives outlined in their charters.

"The best way to make progress in this community is to have working prototypes, to determine what will work the best," said SDSC's Reagan Moore, who is a co-chair of the Remote Data Access working group. "The Grid Forum is still coming together, but we're already making headway."

The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) unites 46 universities and research institutions to build the computational environment for tomorrow's scientific discovery. Led by UC San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), NPACI is funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program and receives additional support from the State and University of California, other government agencies, and partner institutions. The NSF PACI program also supports the National Computational Science Alliance. For additional information about NPACI, see http://www.npaci.edu/, or contact David Hart at SDSC, 858-534-8314, dhart@sdsc.edu.