Interoperation takes a step forward

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Under the umbrella of the Open Grid Forum Standards Council, a new working group—the Production Grid Infrastructure Working Group (PGI-WG)—was formed in late December 2008. This new working group has emerged from the ongoing work that has been taking place in the Grid Interoperation Now Community Group (GIN-CG).

The GIN-CG looks at short-term steps that are needed to enable e-Science applications which need resources from more than one production infrastructure. The PGI-WG group will define the requirements for secure job and data-management service interfaces across multiple infrastructures. The Web service interfaces and schemas defined by the PGI-WG will be a set of profiles based around open standards and specifications, such as the OGSA-Basic Execution Services, Job Submission Description Language, GridFTP, Storage Resource Manager, and the work of the GLUE2 working group.

The coming together of three European middleware groups in an open process represents an important milestone. It allows other grids around the world to join the standardisation activity and to contribute their experiences. It also allows software providers to get involved. It is a significant step in the grid community’s transition to the model proposed within the European Grid Infrastructure, where e-infrastructure built from different software will have to interoperate seamlessly. The PGI-WG will define profiles and, where necessary, new specifications that will be used to drive the selection of components into the Universal Middleware Distribution, itself a key objective in the creation of EGI.

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