Ian Foster

Workshop on Building Effective Virtual Organizations

I am involved in organizing  an NSF-sponsored  workshop, "Building Effective Virtual Originations" (BEVO) to be held in Washington, DC, on January 15 and 16. As we write on the Web page:

Virtual organizations are increasingly central to the science and engineering projects funded by the National Science Foundation. Indeed, if you are a researcher or educator, chances are that you if don't already lead or participate in at least one distributed team, you will soon.

Unfortunately, chances are also that you have never been told how to establish such teams, how to make them successful, or what technologies exist that can help them function effectively. You probably haven't had many opportunities to interact with others building, or just working in, virtual organizations, either.

Our goal at this workshop is to help address this knowledge gap. We invite you to take this opportunity to come and learn what is required to make virtual organizations successful, contribute your experiences and challenges to the discussions, and to establish new connections that will help you succeed in your research and education projects in the future.

The workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which has identified virtual organizations as a fundamental element of its infrastructure plans. Attendees will be responsible for their own travel and hotel. There is no fee to attend the workshop, but registration is required as space is limited.

We're still finalizing some of the speakers, but this is a unique opportunity both to learn about what it means to make virtual organizations work in practice, and to meet and talk with others engaged in the "virtual organization lifestyle" ...

On Interdisciplinary Work

I recently came across this quote from Théophile Gautier (1811–1872)'s poem L'Art:

Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.

[Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel (not email!)]

I think this summarizes well the merits of interdisciplinary work and the challenges and joys of system-level science.

Earth to be paradise; distance to lose enchantment

I recently had the occasion to present a talk on "virtual environments and knowledge production." This got me thinking about just how virtual environments can help with the important tasks of enhancing both individual and collective human creativity. My talk tries to highlight some of what has been accomplished and some of the challenges that lie ahead. (However, as I continue to strive to remove words from slides [recalling Beckett's admonition that "every word is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness"], the slides themselves may not make much sense!) I mentioned the following as some of issues that must be addressed for virtual worlds (a subset of virtual environments) to be useful for "knowledge production":

• Integration with the physical world, e.g., sensors and instrumentation
• Integration with the rest of the cyberworld
• Integration with simulation
• Security and trust, in their many forms
• Abstractions, metaphors, interfaces
• Scale (data volumes, simulation fidelity)

During my reading, I came across a nice article by Gary Olson and Judith Olson, Distance Matters, which included a delightful quote from Arthur Mee:

If, as it is said to be not unlikely in the near future, the principle of sight is applied to the telephone as well as that of sound, earth will be in truth a paradise, and  distance will lose its enchantment by being abolished altogether.

(Arthur Mee was best known for his Children's Encylopedia, but here he is writing in 1898 about the impact of the telephone.)

Grid.org

Univa UD has re-launched "grid.org"--previously dedicated to philanthropic computing projects--as:

a single location where open-source cluster and grid information can be aggregated and where community members can exchange information, experiences, and ideas related to the complete open source cluster software stack. In particular, but not exclusively, Grid.org provides a community where users of Cluster Express, and the various open source components it comprises, can interact with each other and with the source code.

I recall finding it frustrating that the URL "grid.org" (which I would have loved to have back when our Grid book first came out) was devoted to "desktop computing." But things sometimes come to those who wait!

For those interested in applying their home computers to philanthropic computing projects, I recommend the World Community Grid, which harnesses idle computers for useful purposes such as modeling potential AIDS and cancer drugs.

HealthGrid Comes to Chicago, June 2-4 2008

The opportunities to apply grid  computing methods in health care are, simply put, enormous. (Irving Wladawsky-Berger refers to it as the "ASCI of Grid" to imply that the challenges are comparable in their extreme scale to those tackled by the DOE ASCI program in simulation. That is an understatement.) There is an urgent need for community, best practices, standards, and the like.

These considerations motivated the formation of the HealthGrid.US Alliance (HG.US), a partnership of scientific, medical and technology professionals from academia, industry and government, whose shared mission is to promote the application of advanced information technology to solve cutting-edge problems in Biomedical Science and Healthcare. HG.US is an affiliate of the international HealthGrid Association.

As a first action, HG.US is sponsoring the first HealthGrid Annual Meeting to be held outside of Europe, in Chicago, Illinois, USA, June 2-4 2008. See the announcement (pdf). The previous five meetings (2003-2007, held in Europe, have formal published proceedings that are also available from the website.

Relative debugging with Guard

When modifying software, or ported it from one system to another, one often ends up checking for correctness (and attempting to diagnose errors) by comparing the execution of a new program with a reference version that is known to work. My Australian friend and colleague David Abramson developed a tool called Guard to automate this process. With Guard, you specify the variables you want to monitor, and when, and then fire up the new and reference versions of your software. Guard monitors the specified variables, and notifies you when their values differ.

John Michalakes and I had the occasion to work with  Guard back in 1996 when we applied it in a project developing a parallel mesoscale weather model, MM5. It was spookily wonderful to see differences between the parallel and sequential implementations become visible in real-time in a 3-D visualization. (The figure shows a 2-D plot of differences, which is also useful but less beautiful.) It also then became extremely easy to fix those problems. We wrote a paper together on this work, which won a best paper award at SC'96, due I think to David's presentation skills--and the videos.)

This technology has now been licensed by Cray for use in their new Cascade program. It's exciting to see the technology making its way into mainstream use.

Globus in Reno next week

As usual, many in the grid and HPC community are migrating to the "SC" conference, this year in delightful Reno. There will be a huge number of talks and demonstrations on Globus applications, infrastructures, and technologies. Here is a partial list of talks and demonstrations. Come to the Argonne booth to see our new advance reservation service, learn about the latest in Globus technologies, hear what Earth System Grid has been up, see parallel programs running via Swift!

It is not too late to sign up for the Globus and GridFTP tutorials, to be held on Sunday and Monday respectively.

My colleagues from Univa UD will be there also, showing off their new Cluster Express product. Stop by their booth to say hello to Steve Tuecke and others.

Please let us know if you want to meet to discuss your use of Globus, your ideas for future Globus development, and/or technologies that you think complement Globus software.

I myself will not be attending SC this year due to other commitments--the first time in many years that I am missing the conference. And no, it is not because it is being held in Reno.

Microsoft eScience Conference

A belated report--I attended the Microsoft eScience Conference in North Carolina recently. It started on a Sunday, which offends my humanist principles, but I decided to go for the whole meeting, and thus awoke at 4am on Sunday to catch a plane. Overall the effort was worth it--I was there for a great kickoff talk by Kelvin Droegemeier, which suggested that their decade-long effort to create accurate tornado forecasts is bearing fruit, and the rest of the meeting was good also. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to talk with many UK eScientists.

One talk I enjoyed was Carole Goble and David de Roure's double act on the use of Facebook technology for social networking among scientists ("myExperiment"). I hope that they are instrumenting this system carefully so that we can determine whether, when, how, and why (?) people choose to share information on such systems.

From Chicago, Tibi Stef-Praun presented a poster on work on computational economics and Ioan Raicu presented a talk on his work on "data diffusion."

I participated in a panel on overcoming barriers to adoption of eScience. One phrase that I particularly liked, from remarks by Alex Voss: we should not build but foster infrastructure. "Fostering infrastructure" has a good ring to it.