Craig A. Lee
The Aerospace Corporation
CCGrid was organized by the General Chairs Sangsan Lee and Satoshi Sekiguchi with Program Chairs Satoshi Matsuoka and Yutaka Ishikawa. CCGrid enjoyed the support of the IEEE, ACM, the IEEE Computer Society's Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC), and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Supporting organizations include HP, Grid Research, Inc., Angstrom Microsystems, AMD, IBM and NTT Communications.
CCGrid focuses on the combined areas of cluster and grid computing which share many related technical issues, and are both areas of intense interest and rapid growth. Following a traditional structure, the symposium consisted of three keynote addresses (one each morning), three tutorials, seven workshops, a poster session, an industry track, and a BoF. (Surprisingly, there were no panels.) 39 papers were presented in the main conference and 61 papers were presented across all of the workshops.
The three keynotes covered the spectrum of important cluster and grid computing issues. Erik Debenedictis (Sandia National Laboratories) spoke on "The Red Storm Computer Architecture and its Implementation". Masaru Kitsuregawa (Univ. of Tokyo) spoke on "Web Mining in Parallel". Ken Miura (National Institute of Informatics) spoke on "NaReGI - The Japanese National Research Grid Initiative". Dr. Miura is also the project leader of NaReGI which will be a valuable national experience for facilitating the large-scale adoption of grid technology.
Proceedings of the CCGrid 2003 has been published by the IEEE Computer Society Press, USA; and will also be available in the IEEE CS digital library.
Notable were the Grid Peer-to-Peer (GP2P) Workshop and the Grids and Advanced Networks (GAN) Workshop. Many feel there will be a convergence of peer-to-peer computing and grid computing. That is to say, if grid computing is conceived as a set of services organized using protocols, then peer-to-peer is a natural system design that can easily exploit a grid infrastructure. This theme in the many papers presented in the GP2P workshop was echoed in the GAN workshop.
Grid computing has emerged as the predominant approach for wide-area, high-performance computing, but other approaches, such as Peer-to-Peer Computing and CORBA, are also emerging that are motivated more by the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. These application domains are faced with the same fundamental problems, e.g., resource discovery, scheduling, security, etc., but the solution spaces and potential implementations could be quite different and determined by the commercial marketplace. Hence, the future of cluster and grid computing will be heavily influenced by how they co-evolve with these other global computing paradigms.
CCGrid 2003 was highly successful by any standards. Despite the widely publicized international health concern over SARS, CCGrid was very well attended. Only a few presenters who could not attend for other reasons, opted to use the remote video presentation capabilities that the conference organizers made available.
CCGrid 2004 will be chaired by Charlie Catlett (who is also General Chair of the Global Grid Forum and the TeraGrid Project) with Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago) as the Program Chair. CCGrid 2004 will take place April 12-15, 2004, in Chicago, Illinois. Full details are available at http://www.ccgrid.org.
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