INDUSTRY

SAN DIEGO, CA -- The Global Grid Forum (GGF), a community-initiated forum of individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or "grid" technologies, announced today that the membership of the Peer-to-Peer Working Group (P2PWG), created for the advancement and interoperability of peer-to-peer computing, has unanimously approved joining forces with the GGF. “The GGF has been actively tracking the wide range of commercial and intellectual creativity in the peer-to-peer area. We believe that uniting our memberships and bringing over some of the most innovative and entrepreneurial software companies will both strengthen and broaden the activities of the GGF. In addition, the GGF will gain a new range of desktop and consumer applications,” said Charlie Catlett, chair of the GGF steering group. “The increased industrial representation and participation which balances the academic focus of a significant portion of our membership is very appealing and will benefit both groups.” “Convergence of peer-to-peer and grid computing is a natural outcome of recent distributed systems thinking,” said Colin Evans, Director of Distributed Systems, Intel Labs. “This merger gets a critical mass of industry support behind the key objectives of the P2PWG. Both organizations stand to benefit from this event with a view towards Web Services evolution". The P2PWG creates best practices that enable interoperability between computing and networking systems for the peer-to-peer community at-large. The GGF promotes Grid technologies and applications via the development and documentation of best practices, implementation guidelines, and standards with an emphasis on rough consensus and running code. The transition will be complemented by the appointment of Dr. Andrew Chien, CTO of Entropia, as area director for the peer-to-peer area within GGF. Dr. Chien will continue to serve as a member of GGF’s steering group.