OGF Refocusing its Mission
During the OGF23 event, the Open Grid Forum (OGF) updated its mission. The original statements since the OGF and EGA merge was:
The Open Grid Forum accelerates grid adoption to enable business value and scientific discovery by providing an open forum for grid innovation and developing open standards for grid software interoperability. OGF provides an open forum that brings together key individuals and organizations from the grid community to align requirements; identify and remove barriers; workshop best practices that will expedite grid adoption. As an open standards organization, OGF collaborates extensively with other standards development organizations to align with existing industry standards and develop new specifications to enable grid software interoperability.
The new mission does not mention the term Grid anymore. Since the Grid is often identified with a type of infrastructure and the related enabling middleware and since new terms are emerging for the support of the same functionality (e.g., Cloud), the OGF moves the focus to the final goal which is the support of applied distributed computing. Years back, Grid was considered the new way to do distributed computing. It was the new name for the “What” and “How”. Today, the Amazon Cloud approach (“Infrastructure as a Service”) enables new approaches, like deploying a batch system on demand (see RightGrid). That’s why probably the OGF decided to refocus the mission statement as follows:
OGF is an open community committed to driving the rapid evolution and adoption of applied distributed computing. Applied Distributed Computing is critical to developing new, innovative and scalable applications and infrastructures that are essential to productivity in the enterprise and within the science community. OGF accomplishes its work through open forums that build the community, explore trends, share best practices and consolidate these best practices into standards.
In the scope of the mission, to be considered also:
Applied distributed computing environments include everything from distributed high performance computing resources (traditional ‘Grids’) to horizontally scaled transactional systems supporting Service Oriented Architectures to Clouds, across all scales and for all application domains.
I recommend also to read the list of FAQ.
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