The Global Grid Forum has selected HP's Mark Linesch as its new chair, succeeding Charlie Catlett of Argonne National Laboratory, who served for five years as the Grid computing standards-setting body's founding chairman.
Linesch will serve full-time as an independent GGF chair, with funding and support from Hewlett-Packard. He will begin his three-year term at GGF-12 in Brussels next month.
As vice president for HP's Adaptive Enterprise Program, Linesch has been working on Grid and next-generation distributed computing architectures and solutions. In an email, Catlett said Linesch was the group's "overwhelming" choice.
The search subcommittee was chaired by Dennis Gannon of Indiana University, and included Ian Baird of Platform Computing, Peter Clarke of University College, London, and Ian Foster of Argonne and the Globus Alliance. The subcommittee considered more than 20 nominees, Catlett said, interviewing many of them and selecting a list of final candidates.
The Grid Forum's steering group and advisory committee interviewed the finalists and each member listed their top three choices.
"We selected Mark Linesch from Hewlett-Packard by an overwhelming majority," Catlett said.
During Catlett's tenure, GGF has grown from a small group of primarily academic researchers to become the preeminent Grid standards body, with more than 50 technical groups and participation from more than 30 countries and 500 organizations around the world. In the last few years, Grid computing has made strong inroads into commercial enterprises looking for a way to maximize their IT infrastructure.
While Linesch represents the Grid Forum's growing commercial constituency, Catlett said he "has a good background working with the technology research/academic communities from various things he's done in industry, so I think he will do a great job continuing to strengthen GGF's multi-cultural community."
In a statement, Linesch stressed both the academic and commercial aspects of Grid computing. "Grid computing, based on open, industry standards, is providing the distributed computing platform for research collaboration and new scientific discovery throughout the world today," he said. "The work of the Grid community is also enabling exciting new business opportunities for Grid-related products and services. This is a great opportunity for research and industry and I am excited to be able to contribute."
"Mark's selection comes at a pivotal point for the GGF, as it works closer with industry to ensure the standards created are relevant to both the academic and industrial communities," said Baird.
NIST Studies Grids
Computer scientists at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently launched a new project to understand how computer Grids react to volatile conditions.
An NIST release said a computer grid's strength — the teaming of many computers — also makes it more vulnerable to failures, viruses, sudden changes in workload and cyber attacks such as denial of service. NIST researchers are developing computerized models that will help establish how vulnerable Grid networks are to failure. They hope to create ways to detect failure quickly and then fix the problem.
The NIST researchers hope to complete their models by early next year.
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