Global Grid Forum (GGF) 16 meeting was held on 13-16 February 2006 in Athens, Greece. Two participants from IMCS UL joined the event to participate in specification, guidelines and software development working group meetings as well as to get insight into the international Grid activities, projects and developments.

Both participants enjoyed the keynote speakers and participated in the working groups related to their field of expertise.

Jānis Džeriņš is working as software developer at IMCS UL, so at the GGF he focused mostly on developments, projects and trends in this area. He participated in the SAGA (Simple API for Grid Applications) discussions, OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture) ByteIO section, Semantic Grid working group meeting as well as GT4 (Globus Toolkit) status & experiences session. The general trend there was to simplify development of Grid applications for the end-users, because currently many applications are not stable enough to persuade end-users to invest their time to learn and use the technology. One of the possible solutions might be wider usage of well developed and stable products, like GT4. Jānis impression was that the most active in the GGF are infrastructure development working groups. Also Grid user interoperability increasing issue was addressed as very important and critical for future Grid developments.

 Uldis Koškins is the main Grid software installator at IMCS UL, his main interests at the GGF were high performance network and security issues. He participated in the Workshop On Reliability & Robustness in Grid Computing Systems, Grid High Performance Networking Research Group meeting, Firewall Issues Research Group Session and Security Area Meeting. At the GGF Uldis got very useful information about Infiniband and Myrinet for MPI (Message Passing Interface) to handle real time actions like job scheduling, line reservations, latency monitoring, etc. Uldis impressions about the security related sessions were that people are willing to share their ideas but not the ready solutions which are very often commercial.

As this was the first IMCS UL participation in the GGF it was very important to get the general feeling about the global processes in the Grid community and overview on the projects where IMCS UL could participate and contribute more actively in the future.