9grid advocacy, etc.

First of all, I am very glad of this initiative.  thanks to ron for 
setting it up.

(speaking from the UK)
There has been a huge financial commitment to "the GRID" in the UK 
science community (sorry, the e-Science community) [1].  To get to 
play, you pretty much are mandated to use the Globus toolkit / Open 
Grid Service Architecture (I will not attempt to navigate through the 
forest of acronyms).

Simplicity, clarity, generality.
Its been said before, and its been said on this list.

You can pitch the "Dao of 9" in about 5 minutes.  I do it all the time.

However, I have yet to really understand the overall model in the 
received GRID (globus) approach.  Its so fragmented, so unsatisfying.  
Anecdotally, its patina of utility is rather thin.

It would be great to have parallel design studies for a distributed 
system using globus/OGSA vs plan9/inferno.   Such reference material 
will be needed to win "political" arguments; the technical ones will 
win themselves.

I will be trying to do my bit.  Vita Nuova are partnering a PhD 
studentship with me to explore a "9grid" architecture in some 
bioscience applications [2].
It is great to have a focus for the various initiatives, in order to 
build the community.

regards to all.

Leo

[1] http://www.escience-grid.org.uk/
[2] http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lsdc1/outline.htm


-- 
Leo Caves, Computational Biology, University of York
http://www.york.ac.uk/biology/staff/lsdc.htm