Open Grid Forum

Alan Sill directs the U.S. National Science Foundation Cloud and Autonomic Computing industry/university cooperative research center at Texas Tech University and serves as President for OGF. He has been involved in scientific computing for more than 40 years, having gravitated toward this topic as an undergraduate student and has been on the computing side of science ever since. His formal training is as a physicist and has done work at several national labs and as a visiting professor at universities in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. Much of his work in computation has been driven by the science needs of experiments at the particle colliders in Japan, at Fermilab and CERN, and other similar large-scale projects. In addition to his role as site director for the NSF CAC at TTU, he holds positions as a senior scientist at the High-Performance Computing Center and adjunct professor of physics at Texas Tech.

Dr. Sill has an extensive publication record in particle physics, nuclear physics, cosmic ray astrophysics and scientific computing topics. He participated in the experiments that discovered the top quark and of the Higgs boson at Fermilab and CERN, and helped to develop the scientific computing infrastructures that supported this work and later extended support to many other fields of science. He is currently an active member of the CMS and RD-52 experiments at CERN and of the IEEE, the Distributed Management Task Force, TeleManagement Forum, Open Grid Forum and other cloud standards working groups, and serves on several national and international standards roadmap committees. He also co-chairs the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s “Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart Adoption of Cloud Computing” working group and also co-organizes the ongoing developer-oriented Cloud Interoperability Plugfest series in partnership with other open standards organizations and software projects.

In the course of his work, Dr. Sill has been deeply involved with a wide variety of standards organizations, including working groups on grid security, middleware development, authentication and authorization, and remote collaboration, and was a founding charter member of The Americas Grid Policy Management Authority, the accrediting arm for North, South and Central America of the International Grid Trust Federation. He served as Secretary for TAGPMA for its initial two years and helped to develop its charter and mission, and remain an active TAGPMA member. He is an active volunteer in the community and enjoys personal hobbies in hiking, climbing, and a variety of high-adventure outdoor activities.

Jens Jensen is currently a group leader, scientist and researcher at the Science and Technologies Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from Aarhus University. Jens Jensen is a principal scientist for STFC, one of seven UK research councils, where he leads the GridPP storage and data management group.

His research interests are in high-end scientific data storage and processing, data security, identity management and authorisation. He has been deeply involved for several years in topics re;lated to federated identity management and single sign on for large-scale scientific organisations. Beyond these topics, he is interested in general in the development and application of scientific modeling and in scientific approaches to petascale computing.

Dr. Jensen has been involved in OGF and in related organisations such as the Interoperable Global Trust Federation (IGTF) for the past several years, and managed the UK e-Science Certificate Authority for the IGTF. He led the security work package in the EU-funded Contrail project, served as area director for security in OGF, and works on many other projects with a focus on large scale data management and trust and security, with an emphasis on practical interoperation. He has served for several years as leader of several OGF working and community groups and as Area Director for Security for OGF.

Wolfgang Ziegler is a member of the scientific staff of the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), where he has worked since 1987. He joined the department of bioinformatics in 2005 as head of Grid and Cloud Middleware Research Group. His research areas are Cloud Computing, resource management and scheduling, data protection, data security, and electronic Service Level Agreements.

He has been active in OGF and its predecessor organizations since 1999, and was a co-founder of the European EGRID. Since 2001, he has co-chaired several working groups of the Global Grid Forum and the Open Grid Forum and served as Area Director for Applications. Currently he is co-chairing the Grid Resource Allocation Agreement Protocol Working Group (GRAAP-WG), which has developed WS-Agreement, a recommendation of an XML language for specifying a service level agreement between a resource/service provider and a consumer, and a protocol for creation of an agreement using agreement templates. The GRAAP-WG has also developed WS-Agreement Negotiation, a protocol to negotiate agreements with WS-Agreement.

In addition to his research work, Mr. Ziegler has been and is involved in programme committees of a number of conferences and workshops in the field of Distributed Computing. He participated as work-package leader or coordinator in several national and European Grid projects, e.g. D-Grid, the CoreGRID Network of Excellence, the Integrated Project PHOSPHORUS, and the SmartLM project. He has been involved in the Cloud research projects Cloud4Health, OPTIMIS and currently contributes to the FORTISSIMO project. Moreover, he led the development of elasticLM, a solution for software licensing and license management in distributed computing environments such as Grids and Clouds.

Since 2013, is involved in the Cloud Standards Coordination (CSC) collaborative activity between the European Commission (EC) and ETSI (the European Telecommunication Standards Institute.