Related bodies projects and jargon

Global Grid Forum (GGF) (link opens in a new window)

International body growing out of the High Performance Computing community which is developing into the de-facto standards organisation for grid developments. Works in a similar way to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which is responsible for most standards related to the Internet. This body is recognised by most, if not all, grid projects as the means to defining the best practices and standards that will be essential to the international success of grid computing. The GGF has a developing formal mechanism for developing and adopting standards, though none is yet published. The GGF meets 3 times a year, alternating (so far) between Europe and the US.

Effectively a special interest group of most of the large scale (particle) physics related grid projects. The aim of the groups is to ensure that different national and international physics grid projects can and do work together, without having to wait for standards and best practices from the GGF when these do not exist.The Coordination group, made up of the P.I.s of the major grid projects (including EDG and GridPP), aims to meet close to GGF meetings.

Infrastructure tool kit for grid computing. Forms the basis of almost all current grid projects, providing services for user authentication, security, resource discovery and data transfer. An academic project from the HPC community, globus software and support will soon be available from up to 12 commercial companies.

In its simplest form, Condor is a batch system allowing distribution of computing tasks over multiple computers. The system allows idle cycles on spare computers to be used efficiently. The "globus-enabled" version, Condor-G, allows distribution of tasks to different computing systems in a controlled way, using the globus security infrastructure to handle authentication etc.