Open Grid Forum

Open Grid Forum

Formation	2006
Type	Standards Development Organization
Purpose	Developing standards for grids and creating grid communities
Chair, Board of Directors	Stephen Newhouse
Website	www.ogf.org

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and produces documents with many acronyms such as OGSA, OGSI, and JSDL.

The OGF has two principal functions plus an administrative function: being the standards organization for grid computing, and building communities within the overall grid community (including extending it within both academia and industry). Each of these function areas is then divided into groups of three types: working groups with a generally tightly defined role (usually producing a standard), research groups with a looser role bringing together people to discuss developments within their field and generate use cases and spawn working groups, and community groups (restricted to community functions).

Three meetings are organized per year, divided (approximately evenly after averaging over a number of years) between North America, Europe and East Asia. Many working groups organize face-to-face meetings in the interim.

The concept of a forum to bring together developers, practitioners, and users of distributed computing (known as grid computing at the time) was discussed at a "Birds of a Feather" session in November 1998 at the SC98 supercomputing conference. Based on response to the idea during this BOF, Ian Foster and Bill Johnston convened the first Grid Forum meeting at NASA Ames Research Center in June 1999, drawing roughly 100 people, mostly from the US. A group of organizers nominated Charlie Catlett (from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago) to serve as the initial chair, confirmed via a plenary vote was held at the 2nd Grid Forum meeting in Chicago in October 1999. With advice and assistance from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), OGF established a process based on the IETF. OGF is managed by a steering group.