“Standard” can often be equated with “average” or “boring”: how can you innovate or invent when you’re bound by standards and regulations? How can you push the boundaries when you’re stuck inside a box?

Yet how can you create something on a grand scale—something that can slot together with other grand things—unless you create something interoperable. Something standard.

Adopting open, common standards for grid computing might sound obvious. But when was the last time you needed a ¼ inch screw and only had metric screws available? And have you ever blown up a 120V machine by accidentally sticking it into 240V mains? So much for "universal" standards!

The sticky question is, which standards should be used for grid computing?

There are hundreds of software developers working to create dozens of different grids, and each of these developers have their own views on what makes a good standard. While they work, technology continues to evolve and provides new tools that need to be integrated within the existing grid machinery, which may require revising the standards.

Who is in charge of grid standards?

The Open Grid Forum is a standards body for the grid community. With more than 5000 volunteer members, this body is a significant force for setting standards and community developments.

Even now, given that grid computing is still in its infancy, there is an extraordinary level of agreement on core technologies. Essentially all major grid projects are being built on protocols and services provided by the Globus Toolkit, an open-source infrastructure that provides many of the basic services needed to construct grid applications, such as security, resource discovery, resource management and data access.

A standard in action: GridFTP

Grid computing provides the IT grunt needed to power data-intensive scientific applications, such as drug discovery or high energy physics. As part of this, massive amounts of data must be shunted around the world at high-speed. Although there are many different ways of storing and partitioning such data, the grid community have agreed on just one way of transferring it: GridFTP.

Also known as the “grid file transfer protocol”, GridFTP is the accepted method for securely and reliably transferring large volumes of data across distributed computing grids. It is based upon standard Internet FTP protocol, but is tailored to support the special needs of grid computing, including authentication and confidentiality features, reliability and fault tolerance, and third party and partial file transfer,

GridFTP was developed by the Globus project. The GridFTP Working Group, organized by the Open Grid Forum, continues to coordinate updates to its protocol.

A “de facto” standard: VOMS

“Virtual organizations” are the human backbone of grid computing: groups of researchers from around the world who collaborate on common challenges, using grids to share and integrate their data and resources. The Virtual Organization Management System, or VOMS, is a system that allows distributed VOs to centrally manage the roles and authorizations of their members. Using VOMS, site administrators can generate local credentials for specific VO members, providing them with a single login and access to VO grid resources for a set time.

VOMS was developed by the DataGrid and EGEE projects. Although not an official standard, it is used by many VOs around the world.