State of Grid Users: 25 Conversations with UK eScience Groups

During July and August 2004 we visited various applied science and middleware groups in the U.K. in order to gather basic information on the services and functionality these projects are using. Our motivation was to help guide the development of future activities and priorities within the U.K.’s Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute [OMII] and the Globus Alliance [Globus] and to inform the wider Grid community of the status of some current services. We held meetings with application developers with some Grid (generally Globus Toolkit 2 or Globus Toolkit 3) or Web services experience, those with software that might be of broader use or interest, and those who have expressed dissatisfaction with current tools, in order to understand their issues in more detail. The twenty-five groups, listed in Appendix A, included representative applications from biology, chemistry, physics, climatology, and other scientific fields, as well as a smaller set of basic tool builders. In addition, informal discussions took place at several workshops during this time to get a broader scope in certain areas [secWS, SerWS, NFNN].