INDUSTRY

CHICAGO -- With planning in full swing for the second GlobusWORLD, conference organizers have released the advance program and announced several keynote speakers. The annual event centers on the Globus Toolkit, a suite of software and services that are central to the growing field of Grid computing. GlobusWORLD 2004 will be held January 20-23 in San Francisco. Preliminary program and other details are at http://www.globusworld.org. This year's conference builds on successes of the first GlobusWORLD, which attracted more than 450 attendees, one-third of whom were from the commercial sector. The conference will deliver a content-rich three days with four concurrent sessions of presentations, training and discussions for users at all levels, with an additional day devoted solely to workshops on topics such as the Grid's use in financial services, the life sciences and medical imaging. Sessions will be led by users, designers, developers, and vendors from the research, industry and academic sectors. They will address strategic issues for enterprise planners, such as return on investment, business case, and strategic value of the Grid. In-depth technical issues -- such as security, resource management, data access and integration, autonomic computing, monitoring and discovery, service management, provisioning, meta-scheduling, workflow and Web services -- will be addressed for architects, developers, and deployers. The Globus Toolkit® provides key enabling software and services that let people share computing power, databases, and other tools securely online across corporate, departmental, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy. It has been deployed broadly worldwide for both science and industry and has developed a strong community of contributors and users. "Our conference is the only one organized by principals in the Globus Alliance, which develops the Grid's foundational middleware," said Ian Foster, a primary organizer of the event. "We have seen another large surge of interest in Grid since the June release of Globus Toolkit 3.0, which is the first full-scale implementation of the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI). GlobusWORLD attendees will get the latest and best content -- straight from the source. The program has a good mix of speakers from industry and academia, with the sessions focusing on Globus Toolkit-based technology and solutions." That latest version of the toolkit has been redesigned using the new OGSA/OGSI specifications, which are making Grids easier to design and implement than ever before by using popular Web service standards. Among the other technologies to be featured at GlobusWORLD 2004 are security, resource management, data access and integration, autonomic computing, monitoring and discovery, service management, provisioning, meta-scheduling, workflow and Web services. In addition to describing the currently released software, the conference will feature considerable discussion of future Grid standards and Globus Toolkit implementation plans. The first set of keynote speakers -- with more to be announced later -- includes Foster, leader of the Globus Alliance at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, a central figure in development of the Globus Toolkit and definition of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). Another keynote is Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, known as Cal IT(2). Smarr, a pioneer in prototyping a national information infrastructure to support academic research, governmental functions, and industrial competitiveness, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. Keynotes representing e-Business include Mark Linesch, vice president of Hewlett-Packard's Adaptive Enterprise Program, and Steve Yatko, Credit Suisse First Boston's global chief technology officer for securities IT, who is one of the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2003. Many of the talks, panels and sessions will focus on real-world experiences of Grid deployment, including e-Business and Enterprise Grid deployments. "Globus Insider" sessions will feature a mix of architect-level overviews and in-depth developer-level content on all aspects of the Globus Toolkit 3.0. A new Globus Development Laboratory will let attendees interact with the toolkit's developers. Use of Globus Toolkit in the financial services industry will be a hot topic at the conference, according to Duncan Johnston-Watt, Chief Technology Officer at Enigmatec Corporation, a GlobusWORLD sponsor. "Globus Toolkit 3.0 epitomizes the convergence of Grid computing and Web Services," he said. "Within eighteen months Enterprise Service Grid will be mainstream, with Wall Street taking the lead. For any Wall Street firm that fails to Grid-enable their infrastructure in response to the massive structural changes underway in the financial services industry, it will put at risk their long-term viability." The Globus Toolkit's open source, open architecture software and services have been deployed broadly worldwide for both science and industry, attracting a strong community of contributors and users. The New York Times has called Globus Toolkit "the de facto standard for Grid computing" and praised the "far-sighted simplicity" of its Grid services architecture. MIT Technology Review named it one of Ten Technologies That Will Change the World. Other recent acclaim for the toolkit includes an R&D 100 Award and the Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Tech Transfer.