Organizers of GlobusWORLD 2004 have issued new program details for the conference, which features top experts in Grid computing for e-Business and e-Science. The latest keynote speakers include leaders of companies and organizations that are at the forefront of deploying the Globus Toolkit (GT), the de facto standard middleware that drives the Grid. To be held January 20-23 in San Francisco, the second annual GlobusWORLD (http://www.globusworld.org) is the only conference organized by designers and developers of GT. Grid computing lets people share computing power, databases, and other tools securely online across corporate, institutional and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy. Among the e-Business keynotes will be vice presidents from major IT companies that are aggressively pursuing GT-based solutions. IBM vice president for software development, strategy and architecture Daniel Sabbah will discuss the convergence of Web services and Grid standards, and its relationship to the company's middleware strategy. Hewlett-Packard vice president for adaptive enterprise programs Mark Linesch will also give a keynote, addressing the Grid’s applicability to commercial workloads. E-Science keynotes include Ian Foster of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago (UofC) and Larry Smarr of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal IT2). As leader of the Globus Alliance, Foster will speak about the “State of the Union” of Globus and the Grid, describing new developments in the software’s open-source, open-architecture community and opportunities on the horizon. Smarr will address technologies enabled by dedicated optical networks whose widespread deployment will maximize bandwidth for moving large data objects across virtual organizations. A number of the main conference sessions include top independent analysts who will discuss factors that are hastening or hindering deployments. Because financial services are among the most aggressive commercial users of GT, in several sessions Wall Street experts will describe how that market may be a harbinger of things to come across e-Business as organizations begin tapping the Grid for increased power and efficiency. Steve Yatko, global head of Research and Development IT for Credit Suisse First Boston, will give a keynote on Grid computing for financial services. “GlobusWORLD 2004 will address near- and long-term prospects for the Grid from multiple perspectives,” said program co-chair Steve Tuecke, lead architect of the Globus Alliance in the Distributed Systems Laboratory at Argonne. “Our attendees come from organizations that are at widely varying stages of deploying the Grid -- some still considering how to proceed, and many fully engaged in making open Grid services work for them. Users and decision makers at all levels will find the conference essential as a way to learn about the latest developments and to interact with top Grid developers and deployers.” In response to feedback from last year’s attendees, GlobusWORLD has added "Meet the Developers" sessions to provide unique access to the people responsible for each of the Globus Toolkit’s components. These sessions will be held in the casual atmosphere of a Cyber Café, sponsored by Intel, to promote one-on-one discussions about issues that matter most to users in areas including GT administration; GT core libraries such as Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) and XIO; Grid Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM) and WS-Agreement; data services including GridFTP, RFT, RLS, and OGSA-DAI; Monitoring and Discovery Services (MDS); and Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI). A fourth day adds GlobusWORLD workshops to address specialized topics for attendees who want even more details. The “Build a Grid Service with GT3” workshop will teach developers and technical managers to build a Grid service compliant with the OGSI specification. Another workshop will cover the latest aspects of GT Security, including current and future releases and their relationships to authorization tools such as WS-Security, VOMS, CAS, PERMIS, Akenti and Shibboleth. The Financial Services workshop organized by DataSynapse will be an interactive session to identify common themes and define requirements relative to the Grid and GT. And the Life Sciences and Medical Imaging workshop organized by IBM will feature talks from the pharmaceutical industry (including Johnson & Johnson) and medical imaging (including Siemens Research and Harvard Medical School), along with an emphasis on the Grid’s use for life sciences in academia and government.