Recent Activities

2011-10-10 WS-Agreement update and WS-Agreement Negotiation published
2011-06-21 OCCI Core and Infrastructure updated, OCCI RESTful HTTP Rendering published
2011-04-07 OCCI Core and Infrastructure publication
2011-02-17 DFDL publication and description
2010-03-18: Report of Working Group Activity at OGF28

Why Standards?

Why Standards? Standards are an essential aspect of modern industrialized society. Standards permeate every aspect of life, SAE lubrication standards, standard size screws and sockets, voltage standards, grain and protein feed mix standards, and standard battery sizes are just a few of the thousands of standards that make modern life possible. What makes standards so important is that it allows consumers (or vendors of other products that use the standardized product as an input) a wide choice of different vendors, eliminating vendor lock-in. For vendors it commoditizes the product, facilitates the formation of markets, and allows vendors to compete effectively against others on aspects such as price, quality, or delivery time.

The situation is similar in the Grid computing world. Grid standards benefit users of Grid technology by eliminating vendor lock-in, and permitting the selection of best-of-breed implementations of Grid components. For producers of Grid technology they provide a conformance target that can be used to assure customers of interoperability. Further, they eliminate the need for a Grid vendor to implement all of the many moving parts needed in a successful Grid – they can build specific components of their own (e.g. user interfaces or GUI’s) without the need to develop all of the parts.

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Developing Standards at the OGF

It's sometimes hard to figure out how to get involved in the standards activities at OGF. How is one supposed to make sense of all the different working groups, areas and their relationship to each other, let alone understand the process that drives publishing the OGF document series or forming new working groups.

With some guidance, it's not too difficult to get an idea of how working groups operate within OGF, and to get some idea on how to participate in existing working groups, how to start your own working groups, and how to produce OGF documents.

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Current OGF Specifications

A list of all the "Recommendation" and "Proposed Recommendation" documents can be found here. What's the difference? After one year of being a Proposed Recommendation, a working group can publish a document describing the various implementations of a specification and, more importantly, their interoperability or conformance with the specification. Once this has happened, a Proposed Recommendation is promoted to a full Recommendation document.

Making Use of OGF Standards

The specifications that are developed at the OGF are often applicable to a wide range of use cases. Depending on what types of problems are being addressed, these specifications can be combined in different ways. Primer documents are useful for showing particular user communities how to make use of OGF standards.

HPC Basic Profile

The HPC Basic Profile specifies how to achieve interoperability between job schedulers managing HPC resources located in different administrative domains, enabling common usage scenarios found within many research and commercial organizations.

ISV Primer

Running applications remotely – on arbitrary resources – is becoming increasingly common in research, engineering and commerce. The OGF has identified, through its community of end-users, middleware providers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and resource providers, a set of common scenarios that they would like to be supported through standards rather than the current adhoc solutions which are difficult to integrate and coexist in modern networking environments. Using specifications that have been developed within and external to the Open Grid Forum, we show how these standards can be used to enable desktop access to distributed computing resources.

OGSA Primer

OGSA is a classic middleware architecture designed to fit within a traditional three layer distributed systems model with an access layer, a services layer, and a resources layer.

Software Implementations

This page contains a list of software implementations of various OGF specifications.