Ian Foster

What Do You Do With a Million Books?

I am looking forward to an upcoming symposium at the University of Chicago: What Do You Do With a Million Books? (November 5 and 6: but why on a Sunday?):

In the wake of recent large-scale digitization projects aimed at providing universal access to the world's vast textual repositories, humanities scholars, librarians and computer scientists find themselves newly challenged to make such resources functional and meaningful.
Digitizing "a million books" ... poses far more than just technical challenges. Tomorrow, a million scholars will have to re-evaluate their notions of archive, textuality and materiality in the wake of these developments. How will humanities scholars, librarians and computer scientists find ways to collaborate in the "Age of Google?"

Speakers include John Unsworth, from the University of Illinois, a pioneer in digital humanities, and Gregory Crane, who's March 2006 article perhaps suggested the name for this symposium. (He discusses the challenges of scale, heterogeneity, granularity, noise, audience, and distributors.)

The Computation Institute is a sponsor. We already have a preliminary project underway applying machine learning technology to english language texts, and I hope to see more such projects in the near future.

Instant Grid from Germany

I've been watching the Instant Grid web develop for a while. Unfortunately, my German isn't too good; fortunately, there is more and more content in English, and from what I can see, it seems really nice.

Instant Grid combines Knoppix Linux, Globus 4.0.2 as Grid middleware, GridSphere (for portals), and some other technology to build a Grid-enabled cluster system that you can boot from CD-ROM onto a collection of PCs.

If anyone has experience using this, let me know.

Web 1.0 Revisited

With all of the hype^H^H^H^H excitement around Web 2.0, and the upcoming Web 2.0 conference, it is good to see some people prepared to celebrate the accomplishments of Web 1.0, such as the underappreciated blink tag and the ever-useful <BR>.

Durable Nonsense

Sally Floyd cites three principles of durable nonsense in a talk on network simulation:

1. For every piece of durable nonsense, there is an irrelevant frame of reference in which it makes perfect sense.
2. Rigorous reasoning from inapplicable assumptions yields the world's most durable nonsense.
3. The roots of most nonsense are found in the fact that people are more specialized than problems.

This concept of "durable nonsense" is wonderful and I think very useful. I suspect that more computer science research than we would like can be categorized in such terms.

I think the source for these principles is R. A. Rosanoff, "A Survey of Modern Nonsense as Applied to Matrix Computations," April 1969, although Floyd also cites John Spragins, "Computer System Performance Modeling and Durable Nonsense", January 1979--perhaps that's where she saw Rosanoff quoted.

Connections Between Grid and P2P

What do Grid and P2P have to do with each other? Adriana Iamnitchi and I wrote a paper on that question a few years ago. The title is "On Death, Taxes, and the Convergence of Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing", which we explained as follows:

It has been reported that life holds but two certainties, death and taxes. And indeed, it does appear that any society-and in the context of this article, any large-scale distributed system-must address both death (failure) and the establishment and maintenance of infrastructure (which we assert is a major motivation for taxes, so as to justify our title!).

Grimoires Service Registry

Luc Moreau writes to me:

We are happy to announce that Grimoires 1.2.0 and Grimoires-WSRF 0.9.0 (for GT4) have been released.

You can download the Grimoires releases from http://sourceforge.net/projects/grimoires/.

Perspectives on Open Source

The topic of open source arose frequently at the recent GlobusWORLD conference. I find the variety of perspectives on this topic fascinating. I have heard various people opine that:

1. Open source is diabolical, because it discourages innovation and/or is risky from a legal perspective. Shai Agassi of SAP expressed such views in a much-reported 2005 speech.
2. Open source is angelic, because it ensures that "speech" (or at least coding) is "free." Richard Stallman is a well-known proponent of this view.
3. Open source is inevitable, for economic reasons, and, as such, should be embraced as part of the IT ecosystem.

The first two views are familiar; the third is newer, and I think far more interesting, as it permits (at least in principle) a quantitative discussion about when and where it makes sense for software to be open vs. closed

Underlying this third view is an evolving perspective on where value lies in software. For a long time, value was seen in the basic software itself, viewed as intellectual property. Now, the basic software is increasingly seen as a commodity. Of course, companies still need to ensure that the software functions on a daily basis, and they typically don't want to maintain the necessary expertise inhouse. Thus, as Gartner wrote recently:

"open source software is a catalyst that will restructure the industry, producing higher-quality software at lower cost ... it will revolutionize software markets by moving revenue streams to services and support and away from license fees."

Vendors larger and small are taking major positions on these views, betting their future on proprietary software (e.g., SAP, Microsoft), open source software (e.g., RedHat, Novell), or both (e.g., IBM, Oracle). It's a fascinating evolution.

Does this mean that IT itself is a commodity? Not exactly. I was talking to Reagan Moore last week, and he expressed the view that value is increasingly in the (proprietary) policies that govern how (open) software is used. That's a perspective that resonates with my experience.

Globus Takes Off in Europe

Google analytics has been providing some nice perspectives on Globus downloads. It is an inspiring reminder of how small a planet we live on: every continent except Antartica shows significant activity.

One thing that I find gratifying is how the release of Globus Toolkit version 4 (GT4) has spurred rapid growth in the Globus user and developer communities in Europe.

Major new deployments have emerged, such as D-Grid, and long-time deployments such as the U.K. National Grid Service and the LHC Computing Grid use many Globus components. There are also numerous neat applications: things like the Gridcast video delivery (for the BBC) and a weather forecasting site at the University of Naples. In the European Union's new BEinGRID project, focused on commercial applications of grid technology, five out of 18 pilots are based on GT4. In addition, OMII Europe has identified Globus as a target platform.

In addition, we see contributions not only from long-time Globus community members such as NeSC and EPCC (source of the OGSA-DAI data access and integration software) but also from new participants via the "dev.globus" incubation process. One nice example is the GridWay scheduler system from Madrid.

There are still some Europeans who think parochially of Globus as "U.S." software, but (if I may make a bad pun) more and more seem to realize it is "us" software, just like Linux, Apache, and other open source systems: an international community effort to develop and support the software, experiences, and operational procedures needed to create Grid systems and applications.

As you can tell, I love to hear about interesting Globus deployments, applications, and research. Please drop me a line to tell me about what you are doing (whether in Europe or otherwise!).

Irving, Lick, and Man-Computer Symbiosis

I have written about the (utopian or distopian?) belief that the inevitable march of Moore's Law will result in computers overtaking us stick-in-the-mud humans in intelligence within a decade or two.

I'm a skeptic, not because I don't think computers are going to get faster and more capable, but because I think human intelligence has a fair bit more evolution to do itself. Human "intelligence" has long been more than simple biology: biology, culture, and technology have been co-evolving for a very long time, and there's no reason to think that culture and technology, at least, won't continue. (Perhaps biology, too, but that's another story.)

In this regard, I find a recent post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger refreshing. He writes about (among other things) how the goal of technology should not just be to automate the easy but also to assist people in doing the hard. To that end, we should be working not to remove people from the picture, but working to "integrate people into all aspects of our systems designs."

These sentiments remind me of J.C.R Licklider's wonderful 1960 paper, "Man Computer Symbiosis," in which he proposed "to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs." (Of course, Doug Engelbart is always worth reading on these topics too.)

Some 50 years ago, Licklider studied his work habits, and noted that "my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability." I suspect that this observation is still far more true than we would like to believe.

But while the problems and ideas may not be entirely new, we are in a far better position to pursue them, given quasi-ubiquitous personal computers, Internet, and innovative new technologies that build on those platforms. As Irving says, "By integrating people into our system designs, we can leverage these community-based, people-oriented technologies [like advanced collaboration environments] into our complex engineering systems ..." The consequences for the many complex activities that occupy our time nowadays could be very significant.

1,000,000 Random Digits

From Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram:

The Rand Corporation published A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates back in 1955, when generating random numbers was hard. I have a copy of the original book; it's one of my library's prize possessions. I had no idea that the book was reprinted in 2002; it's available on Amazon. But even if you don't buy it, go to the Amazon page and read the user reviews. They're hysterical.

For example:

This book does not even come close to delivering on its promise of one million random digits. My expectations were high after reading the first sentence, which contained ten unique digits. However, the author seems to have exhasted his creativity in this initial burst, because the other 99.999% of the book is filler in which those same ten digits are shamelessly reused! If you are looking for a larger offering of numerals in various bases, I highly recommend "Peter Rabbit's ABC and 123."

Thanks to Frank Siebenlist for the pointer.