Introductions

This is the (humble) beginnings of the mostly-official blog of the OSG Technology Area.  As such, I feel it's only appropriate to start with the "who" and "what" we are.  Unfortunately, that makes the opening post of this blog rather dry... it'll pick up, I swear.

First, the "what":  The OSG Technology Area provides the OSG with a mechanism for long-term technology planning.  We do this through two sub-groups:

• Blueprint: Recording the conceptual principles of the OSG and focusing on the long-term evolution of the OSG.  The Blueprint group tries to meet approximately quarterly and, under the direction of the OSG Technical Director, updates the "Blueprint Document" to reflect our understandings of the basic principles, definitions, and the broad outlines of how the pieces fit together.
• Investigations: We're all surrounded by a continuing onslaught of technologies.  Some are fantastic.  Some are not-so-great.  Some are great, but not what we really needed.  In order to manage the way forward - while keeping to the OSG principles - this group does investigations to understand the concepts, functionality, and impact of external technologies.  The point is to identify items that are potentially disruptive in the medium-term of 12-24 months.

Now, the "who":

• John Hover: Leader of the Grid Group at Brookhaven National Lab.  John heads up the Blueprint activity.
• Ashu Guru: Applications specialist at the Holland Computing Center (HCC), based at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  Ashu works for Technology Investigations; currently, he's focusing on how virtual machines may be mixed with "traditional" batch systems.  This will be subject of another post.
• Brian Bockelman (me!):  Yet another HCC staff member.  I've been working heavily in the Technology Area this year; I spent lots of time participating in the rewrite the OSG Blueprint, and am leading the Technology Investigations group.

I'm not going to lie: I have no blogging experience.  However, I am willing to plunge in head-first; please excuse me if I fumble around with the technology a bit (don't worry - I feel much more at home with distributed high throughput computing than social media).  I've got big plans for this blog: I'm hoping to rope the other members of the Technology Area into doing guest posts, pushing for a vibrant OSG-related blogging community, and trying to have this be one of the better outposts for distributed high throughput computing on the internet.

But before all that - I hope you enjoyed the introductions.