A Brief History of the Global Grid Forum
The Global Grid Forum (GGF) is the community of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardization effort for grid computing. The GGF community consists of thousands of individuals in industry and research, representing over 400 organizations in more than 50 countries. Together we work for the pervasive adoption of grid computing worldwide. GGF grew out of a series of conversations, workshops, and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions that addressed issues related to grid computing. The first of these BoFs was held at Supercomputing 1998, the annual conference of the high-performance computing community. That meeting in Orlando, FL, led to the creation of the Grid Forum, a group of grid developers and users defining and promoting grid standards and best practices. The first Global Grid Forum meeting was held in March 2001 and hosted by the Amsterdam Science and Technology Center. Since then, GGF has produced numerous standards and specifications documents and held over a dozen additional events around the world.

Current Efforts Underway
The mission of GGF is to "lead the pervasive adoption of grid computing for research and industry" said Mark Linesch, Chairman, Global Grid Forum. "Our mission is enabled by a three-fold focus on community and standards supported by efficient operations. First, GGF fosters and manages unique communities of interest to capture requirements, share best practices, further research, and accelerate adoption. This broad involvement from research, academia, and industry results in well understood requirements leading to high quality standards and a growing knowledge base of use cases and best practices. Second, a critical component of the GGF mission is to define grid specifications that lead to broadly adopted standards and interoperable software. GGF has developed the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and is working throughout the international community and with related standards organizations to champion this "architectural blueprint" and the associated specifications. The OGSA "blueprint" provides guidance and acts as an "integrating mechanism" for public comment, more detailed specifications, interoperable software implementations, and broad industry adoption over time. Third, GGF community and standards efforts are supported and communicated through our web-site, http://www.ggf.org, the GGF Document Series, GGF events and the generous support of our sponsors. The GGF Document Series contains specifications and best practices that lead to industry standards and interoperable software. GGF events bring together the worldwide grid community three times per year to discuss the latest developments in defining grid specifications and requirements and to communicate new ideas and best practices. Over 75 commercial organizations, research institutions and funding agencies are current GGF sponsors - supporting the pervasive adoption of grid computing by generously contributing their time, resources, and expertise."

A Brief History of the Enterprise Grid Alliance
The Enterprise Grid Alliance, formed in 2004, is a not-for-profit, vendor neutral consortium whose mission is to accelerate the deployment of grid solutions by enterprise-class customers. In the group's effort to assemble the critical domain expertise necessary to achieve its mission, the EGA has succeeded in bringing together more than 30 leading companies - both vendors and end-user - engaged in enterprise grid computing. The EGA has launched a three-pronged approach to accelerate grid adoption in the marketplace: (1) Identifying and resolving issues associated with using existing grid and IT tools to build and manage enterprise-class grids capable of running the full range of existing data center applications. Successfully articulating and addressing these issues is expected to lead to improvements in aligning existing grid computing tools and standards with the needs of the enterprise and a subsequent rapid adoption of technology advances. (2) Educating customers on the benefits of deploying grid solutions in the enterprise. (3) Engaging key influencers, community participants and users, as well as developing partnerships with other industry groups to deliver the necessary standards needed to build the ecosystem required to achieve the EGA's mission. In this way, the EGA complements the work of other Grid stakeholders such as GGF, DMTF, SNIA and Globus Consortium. The EGA has no intention of competing with or duplicating their work and will propose new standards only when relevant standards do not exist.

Current Efforts Underway
EGA presently has five technical working groups focused on understanding the requirements for Grid Computing in a data center environment. Specific focus areas include: Component Provisioning, Data Provisioning, Grid Security, Utility Accounting and Reference Model.

Each Working Group is focused on completing specific technical deliverables and developing strategic relationships with appropriate industry bodies to promote industry-wide consensus on common terminology and agreed use cases, and validation of respective models and standards against enterprise data center requirements.

"Over the past year we have built an impressive team of over 30 members made up of leading vendors and end users committed to working together to propel the grid computing market forward," said Dr. Donald Deutsch, president, Enterprise Grid Alliance. "We believe that EGA's pragmatic approach, increasingly strong relationships with other industry consortia and solid initial results demonstrate that the alliance is well on the way toward achieving its goal of accelerating the adoption of grid computing within public and private sector enterprises."

Ian: One of the consistent pieces of feedback we've been getting from enterprise end users is that it's difficult to keep up with the Grid evolution. From the wide ranging definitions of Grid, to the volume of standards bodies and organizations -- it can be a real challenge to distinguish the significant developments from the hype. Going forward, it will be important for the Globus Consortium, Global Grid Forum and Enterprise Grid Alliance to unify efforts to have clear terminology around Grid technology, and to have a unified voice in the areas that are of mutual interest to all three parties. Grid's promise of open standards and interoperability can be reached only if the critical mass of vendors and influencers are working together.

A Brief History of the Globus Consortium
In 1996, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute kicked off The Globus Project, focused on how to help collaborative science applications make better use of the Internet infrastructure for big data problems. At the heart of this project was the Globus Toolkit, a set of open source building blocks that developers could use to build Grids and take advantage of the cutting edge of hardware interoperability and inter-organizational data sharing capabilities. Today, after nine years of work, based on original funding from federal agencies and companies such as HP, IBM and Sun -- the Globus Toolkit not only has a wildly successful record of Grid implementations in e-science under its belt, but has also become the de facto building block for Grid in the enterprise, and a key part of many enterprise vendors' strategy. The Globus Consortium is a non-profit organization dedicated to the continued commercial advancement of the Globus Toolkit, and has the full support of leading enterprise hardware and software vendors, the original pioneers of Grid, and the open source Grid development community.

Current Efforts Underway
"The Globus Consortium launched less than three months ago, but we already have three major projects underway," said Greg Nawrocki, President of the Globus Consortium. "The first is a priority bug fixing effort. The Globus Consortium has contracted with (Grid services and support company) to fix the bugs that are the most important to our members to resolve. The Consortium will contribute the fixes back to the open source Globus Toolkit, so we're immediately coming out of the gates as a good citizen in the open source community. The second project involves taking an active part in the development of execution management standards. The GT4 development team has come up with an implementation of execution management based on web services (WS-management) standards. Given that this is a tried, tested and proven approach to execution management, we'd like to share it with the open standards community at large. And the third major project is the globalization and internationalization of the Globus Toolkit. Some of the Globus Toolkit's most active contributors are international, and we're working hard to make he code more friendly to the multi-byte character requirements for international developers."

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