You are looking for a development or research project that will contribute to the Globus open source Grid software? Or you have a project that you would like to see done, but you don't have to time to do it yourself? A new wiki provides a clearing house and meeting place where we hope these two classes of people can get together. There aren't many ideas there yet, but the list should grow quickly.
This wiki is not intended as an alternative to the
feature request mechanisms associated with dev.globus projects. Use
bugzilla for that.
OGSA-DAI (Data Access and Integration) is perhaps less well known and understood than some other Globus components. However, it is one of the most useful and successful. Developed in the UK, it provides uniform Web Services interfaces to diverse data resources. These interfaces allow clients not only to "access" data, but also to query, update, transform, and deliver it. In other words, they let you specify some pretty fancy server-side operations.
In my new role as Director of the Computation Institute, I have got to know some statisticians. I'm learning interesting things:
statistics, despite its 19th Century name, is actually an intellectually rich and vibrant field of research, with much to contribute to how we deal with data;
Ross Anderson's wonderful Security Engineering has recently become available online. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes and deep wisdom. Anyone interested in what computer security is really about (i.e., systems, not algorithms) should read it.
The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fast-moving discipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to principals with divergent interests, we find that incentives are becoming as important as technical design in achieving dependability. The new field provides valuable insights not just into ‘security’ topics (such as bugs, spam, phishing, and law enforcement strategy) but into more general areas such as the design of peer-to-peer systems, the optimal balance of effort by programmers and testers, why privacy gets eroded, and the politics of digital rights management.
In other words, the most important components in any security system are the people, and as economics is the study of how and why people make decisions, is very relevant to computer security. Another reason to get University of Chicago economists involved in the Computation Institute ...
Charlie Catlett wrote recently about the GENI program. A quiz: is this ambitious proposal from the networking research community intended to (a) redesign the Internet, (b) get a lot of new money for computer science research, or (c) build testbeds to support innovative networking research?
The answer is "all of the above." Thus, I find GENI interesting for several reasons. First, there's the research agenda, which is to redesign the core Internet protocols to incorporate security, quality of service, and other good things left out by the original designers.
"The conference formerly known as Supercomputing" (now "SC"), takes place in Tampa, Florida, in two weeks time. I'll be there, and one of my goals will be to talk to as many people as possible about their needs for eScience infrastructure and tools.
A recent discussion at Argonne with my colleague John Bresnahan spurred the two of us to write the enclosed note. In brief, we explain how easy it is to get and install distinct Globus services. These notes are also available on the Web. 1) Globus is Modular It is a common misconception that the Globus Toolkit is a monolithic entity. This is *not* true. Each Globus service can be installed and used independently. For example, if you just want GridFTP, you can install just GridFTP. *No* additional software will be installed. You get just the software needed for GridFTP, and *only* what you need for GridFTP.
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