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OGF20 & Grids Mean Business

Much of the reason that I haven't blogged much recently is that I've been up to my eyes in organising OGF20 (colocated with the EGEE User Forum) and in particular the Grids Mean Business industry track. With just over a month to go, I'm pleased to report that we have well over 500 delegates registered and the programme of speakers is rather good. In addition, we have a range of workshops which will look at new developments in Grid middleware and operations.

Our two keynote speakers for OGF20 will be Tony Hey and Peter Coveney. Tony is VP of technical computing at Microsoft and will be giving us a new talk on the Social Grid. Peter is professor of computational chemistry at University College London and has stretched the use of Grid infrastructures to perform massive simulations of chemical processes. Both are excellent speakers and will give fascinating talks. In addition, Mark Linesch and Bob Jones will introduce the activities of OGF and EGEE respectively, while Mario Campolargo will present the European Commission's support for Grid infrastructure.

The Grids Mean Business programme will explore the various stages of uses of Grid in industry. In the first session, Paul Strong of Ebay and William Fellows & Steve Wallage of the 451 Group will set the scene, giving the motivation for and overview of grid. Following sessions will look at Paths for Adoption, Grid Markets, Scaling Up To The Enterprise Level and Collaborative Grids. Speakers will include John van Uden of Citigroup, Chris Swan of Credit Suisse and Brooklin Gore of Micron.

These and other speakers will share their experience from many sectors, including finance, the creative industries and engineering. We will also see some insights into future grid technologies for business. In addition, Ian Osborne and Nick Selby will lead discussions of issues in licensing and security, addressing the problems that IT managers must address when deploying grids.

OF20 and the EGEE User Forum will be at Manchester Central from May 7-11. The Grid Means Business track will be on May 8-9 and there is a special Enterprise Programme registration that is cheaper than that for the full week. If you haven't signed up already, the URL to visit is http://www.ogf.org/OGF20/events_regstrtn_ogf20.php.

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