OSCARS Standard and Open Grid Forum

The Open Grid Forum, or OGF, is an open standards body that is composed of community-driven and community-lead working groups that strive to develop standards for distributed computing. One of the working groups within OGF's Infrastructure Area is the Network Service Interface Working Group (NSI-WG), which is primarily focused on defining application middleware to networks, and network to network service interfaces.

The prior work and experiences with the Inter Domain Controller Protocol (IDCP) influenced the shaping of the NSI Connection Services (CS) protocol through the participation of ESnet in the OGF NSI-WG. The success of the NSI-CS v2.0 protocol was displayed in several demonstrations within the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) Automated GOLE infrastructure, even as recent as SC13.