Ian Foster

Comments from Supercomputing

I'm back from the annual Supercomputing (SC) conference in Tampa. As always there was a lot of cool stuff going on: despite the name, this is just a great place to go to see innovation in technology and its applications. A few things that impressed me:

• OSU's Introduce IDE for Globus Web Services (see picture) being used to create and deploy new services in a few minutes. All those creating services manually should immediately switch to using Introduce!

Science Grid This Week

Science Grid This Week (SGTW) is now International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW). This weekly (duh) newsletter features news and stories on grid technology, grid deployments, and scientific applications enabled by grid. It's easy to subscribe. You should also send it stories on your work. There are many smaller projects that don't get the exposure of the big grid deployments, but they are often just as interesting.

New Computation Institute Website

Thanks to Beth Cerny Patino (architect and implementor) and Mike Papka (CI senior fellow, and chair of the CI infrastructure committee) we have a new Computation Institute web site. There is much more to be done, but this is a big step forward. We'll be adding more information in the near future on our fellows and staff; their current activities and future plans; and our perspectives on computation and its current and future role in science and society (among other things).

Hadoop on EC2

Here's something neat (and details here).

Hadoop, an open source clone of Google FS and MapReduce, can be run on top of Amazon EC2, a hosting service that allows leasing servers on an hourly basis.

As Greg Linden goes on to say:

Developers may now be able to rapidly bring up hundreds of servers, run a massive parallel computation on them using Hadoop's MapReduce implementation, and then shut down all the instances, all with low effort and at low cost. Very cool.

My colleague Tim Freeman points out that you can run those same VMs on your own resources using the Globus Workspace service.

Grid in Spanish/La Grid en Español

A recent article on "la Computacion Grid" in a Spanish Newspaper, by Borja Sotomayor. He concludes:

La Computación Grid, a pesar de ser una tecnología con bastante madurez, sigue estando en constante evolución. Actualmente existen muchas grids computacionales (como EGEE y TeraGrid), construidas para dar salida principalmente a problemas científicos, pero todavía no existe «La Grid». De la misma manera que internet nació en el ámbito científico para luego llegar al público general, lo mismo puede esperarse, a largo plazo, de la Computación Grid. Cuando la tecnología madure lo suficiente, será posible que cualquier usuario, desde su ordenador personal de casa, pueda enviar complejos trabajos computacionales a «La Grid», como si tuviésemos un supercomputador en el salón de casa.

Borja asked me to write a few words, too, which I did. I didn't realize my Spanish was so fluent ...

Web Fundamentalism

Given that it's Sunday, I will write about fundamentalism, a topic that, like the rapture, I find endlessly fascinating. Quoting Wikipedia:

Fundamentalism is a continuing historical phenomenon, characterized by a sense of embattled alienation in the midst of the surrounding culture, even where the culture may be nominally influenced by the adherents' religion. The term can also refer specifically to the belief that one's religious texts are infallible ...

Don't worry, I'm not going to talk about real religion, but rather about fundamentalism in computing. I first encountered this phenomenon in the 1980s, when I hung out with declarative programmers. (Imperative programs are evil! Declarative languages will overcome!) Since then, I've watched with interest as other true paths are progressively revealed and embraced by communities large and small.

More on OGSA-DAI

Stelios Sfakianakis commented on my recent piece on OGSA-DAI:

Regarding OGSA_DAI it seems to me that what you gain by adopting it is the ability to access data through a WS interface. But you don't get any usefull functionality in addition to the plain accessing facilities, for example in order to use OGSA-DAI I have to know beforehand the kind of source database (is it a SQL or XML database?) and the internal schema. So trying to be provocative I would say that OGSA-DAI seems to be something like WS-JDBC.

I asked Malcolm Atkinson for his views on this point. He replied as follows:

Globus in Tampa

Many of the Globus team will be in Tampa, Florida, next week, for the SC'06 conference. Globus technologies and solutions will be discussed and demonstrated in many booths (I think I counted 23 last year) and in many posters and workshops (TeraGrid Institute, GCE'06, and VTDC'06), and a tutorial.

It's hard to capture all of the activity, but here is a partial list, including a schedule of talks to be presented at the Argonne National Laboratory booth.

6 New dev.globus Projects

I am pleased to see an additional six new projects join the dev.globus incubation process, bringing the total to seventeen. The new projects, from Europe and the US, address service development IDEs, security policy management, campus grids, high-level programming, and local resource manager adapters.

Those of you attending the SC'06 conference next week can learn more about these projects, and the dev.globus process, there.

Virtual Organizations at NSF

Dan Atkins is the author of the much-discussed "Atkins report" advocating and defining a US national strategy for cyberinfrastructure. Now he runs the National Science Foundation's new Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and in that position has the opportunity to execute on that report's recommendations--modulo the fact that he doesn't have the $1B budget that his report advocated.

Atkins has a new weblog, CI Topics, with pointers to many interesting documents. I like a recent talk he gave to the NSF Education and Human Resources Directorate. In particular, slides 17 onwards talk about the importance of "VOs"--the technologies and processes that enable communities to form and operate efficiently. I think this is just the sort of work required to scale the benefits of cyberinfrastructure to reach millions of researchers and students. Let's hope Dan can make it happen.