GRIDtoday editor Derrick Harris is reporting from GridWorld in Washington, DC, this week. In capturing highlights from the first day (yesterday), Harris wrote of NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) director Dan Atkins’ keynote:

To underscore his commitment to getting familiar with the Grid community, Atkins posed a series of questions to the room of what appeared to be between 250 and 300 attendees. Among his questions, Atkins asked about a standard definition of Grid – a question that has been asked countless times before. According to Atkins, if the OCI were going to start investing in Grid activities, it would be a help to know what, exactly, the term means.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Grid means everything and nothing.

Apparently the NSF agrees.

In addition to making the clarification of “… the positioning and value proposition for grids within the broader distributed computing ecosystem” a strategic priority for the Open Grid Forum (OGF), perhaps a standard definition of grid should also be added to the list of deliverables.