Distributed Thinking

ETSI recently announced they were entering the Grid standardisation space. This week I got the chance to learn more about this, thanks to Mike Fisher of BT, who leads the relevant ETSI Technical Committee. He explained that ETSI has a protocol and testing competence centre, along with the methods and experience to take specifications written in English and write conformance test suites that allow precise checks of interoperability. This is certainly a facility that the OGF does not have; indeed, the OGSA working group has carefully framed its work to avoid making any claim about conformance. So if the ETSI initiative can agree use cases and find sufficient consensus on standards, perhaps building on OGF work, it could add a valuable facility to the Grids standards community.

This week I attended a meeting at the ITU in Geneva on the topic of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) and Grids. NGNs are developed by the telco industry to provide a range of services over IP networks. The key to their design is the separation of service provision from transport mechanisms. Traffic may be routed over different types of network, each of which provides a common interface. The same traffic may in turn implement all sorts of services, including voice, television, videoconferencing, data transfer, multiplayer games, and whatever application designers come up with in the future. So NGNs have a virtualised infrastructure providing a range of user services. They are using Web Services technology and are tackling issues such as security (authentication, authorisation, audit), accounting & billing, service description and deployment. Which all sounds familiar from the Grid world. That's what this workshop was about. In particular, it was to investigate opportunit

This week I chaired a web seminar on Grid Markets. We had two excellent speakers: Dennis Kehoe from the AIMES Centre in Liverpool and John Darlington from the Imperial College Internet Centre. Between them they covered what is possible for businesses now and what we might expect in the future. After the presentations we had a fruitful discussion and answered some questions from the viewers. This was the first time I've taken part in a web seminar and I know I made some mistakes - such as not introducing myself! A little more briefing by the hosting company would have helped but at least I'll know better for next time. Perhaps I'll even dare to watch myself on the stored video. In the meantime, if you would like to watch the seminar, click to http://brighttalk.com/event/gridcomputingnow/9b8619251a-130-intro-2-1 .