Ian Foster

Visit to Lousiana

I visited the Center for Computation and Technology at LSU in Baton Rouge on Monday. With Ed Seidel's arrival, and much funding from the state, there is a rapidly growing group of smart and interesting people (e.g., Gabrielle Allen, Thomas Sterling, Tevfik Kosar, Dan Katz, and Jon McLaren) and also a growing scientific infrastructure and collection of strong projects.

Gifting Technologies

I enjoyed reading a recent article by Matei Ripeanu and friends, "Gifting technologies: A BitTorrent case study." They look at a set of six BitTorrent communities with different properties and policies, and compare and contrast various metrics such as degree of freeloading and relative contribution of most frequent uploaders. Arguably some of the conclusions regarding how best to encourage "gifting" are obvious, but I don't think they all are, and there are interesting insights into the relative importance of different factors.

Stairway to Heaven

Could it be that some people haven't heard Rolf Harris' stirring antipodean version (another sample and another) of Stairway to Heaven?

Enough about the birthday already ...

I've already written about our celebration of Globus' 10th Birthday at GlobusWORLD in September. But iSGTW has just come out with a nice article on the same topic, so I'll mention it one last time. The article features a startling picture of a (simulated) earthquake in Los Angeles, generated by the Southern California Earthquake Center's TeraShake system. (For more on that application, see another recent article.)

Breaking the medical image communication barrier

A press release from USC describes the Globus-based MEDICUS system, to be demonstrated at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting in Chicago next week. They claim that "doctors [are] finally able to share digital medical images instantly, nationwide, with full patient privacy protection." It is a press release of course, but as I've commented before, it's a pretty neat system. I'll be at RSNA to see it.

Meanwhile, we have two projects underway in the Computation Institute applying the Virtual Data System to medical problems. In one, we are processing 10s of thousands of mammograms and in the other, hundreds of functional MRIs (e.g., see this article). I'll write more about these projects as we get results.

GapMinder: Myths about the developing world

From Dan Atkins, a pointer to a wonderful source of animated information on world development trends. "Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics." You can also see Hans Rosling's talk on this work at TED. I'm not sure which is more amazing: the ways in which modern visualization techniques can be used to bring dry economic data to life, or the misconceptions that many of us (well, myself, certainly) have about the state of our highly dynamic world.

System-level Science

This month's issue of IEEE Computer includes four articles on system-level science: the integration of diverse sources of knowledge about the constituent parts of a complex system with the goal of obtaining an understanding of the system's properties as a whole. This being IEEE Computer, they focus in particular on information technology (IT) issues involved in achieving scientific goals:

[S]ystem-level science integrates not only different disciplines but also, typically, software systems, data, computing resources, and people. System-level science is usually a team pursuit. Data comes from different sources, different groups develop component models, team members provide specialized expertise, and the often substantial computing and data resources required for success are themselves diverse and distributed. Thus, system-level science itself requires the creation of yet another sort of system that may combine large numbers of both physical and human components.

Grid in Government Computer News

Today's issue of Government Computer News (not the most gripping title for a publication ...) has a long article on Grid. The subtitle is, although proven in academia and research, grid computing struggles to find a place in the enterprise, and the author discusses at some length both where grid has been successful and where it has yet to catch on. It's mostly a fair analysis, and the comments on continued relative difficulty of deployment are right on (although improving, thanks to tools such as Introduce). I'd suggest, though, that one reason for the challenging nature of grid deployments is often sheer ambition. Projects like caBIG and TeraGrid, for example, are complex. But they are achieving things that have never been done before.

Bonjour America

I see that a wonderful video blog from France, Bonjour America, has started up again. It is sad to see that M. Vinvin has abandoned his ambition to meet Clint Eastwood. And he now has advertising. But still funny.

Computational Social Sciences

I've been spending a lot of time recently talking with economists--of which the University of Chicago has quite a few. We're running a "Disciplinary Deep Dive" (3-D) look at computational economics this quarter, with lectures and discussions on a wide range of relevant topics.