Ian Foster

Back in the USA

I've been offline for a while due to travel to South Africa (a wonderful week vacation, and then a week at an excellent summer school organized by Judith Bishop), then a few days back, then a week in New Zealand (attending another fine meeting, the New Zealand Computer Science Students Research Conference), two days in Australia to see foolish family members who emigrated their from New Zealand, and then back to Berkeley to attend a DOE meeting on future computing and computational science research programs. Finally home tomorrow. My heading is spinning ...

Off to Africa

I leave today for South Africa, where I will participate in the 4th IFIP School in Software Technology. A week's vacation in the bush west of Johannesburg, then a week at Gordon's Bay near Capetown. It should be a fascinating trip.

Globus at sea

Italian Globus enthusiast Raffaele Montella sent me this picture of the sailboat Sarima V  that he races out of Naples. Apparently he uses grid to good effect in his racing, using an online Globus-based forecasting service to obtain up-to-date weather forecasts prior to each race. Being a sailor myself, I can only applaud (and feel jealous).

He has a paper on this work in the upcoming Grid and Pervasive Computing conference, to be held in Paris May 2-4. Title: "Development of a GT4-based Resource Broker Service: an application to on-demand weather and marine forecasting." I'll post a pointer to the paper once it is online.

News from Puerto Rico

I spent last weekend in Puerto Rico, thanks to an invitation from Wilson Rivera to speak at a Workshop on Wireless Networking, Automated Information Processing, and Web & Grid Services held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing.

The weather was of course pleasant (on a telecon with colleagues in Chicago, I mentioned it was 85 F; one replied "it's just like that here--but without the 80"). But I was particularly impressed with what I learned about work being done at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, e.g., in Wilson's very dynamic Parallel and Distributed Computing Lab. For example, they're doing a lot of work with Globus, and building end-to-end systems to monitor Puerto Rico ecosystems. It's certainly a place to watch.

Supercomputing reaches YouTube

The organizers of SC'06, the big U.S. supercomputing conference, created a video celebrating supercomputing and computational science. This was recently posted to YouTube and is proving popular.

Posner on Second Life

Richard Posner, US judge well known for his books on various topics (and also a lecturer at U.Chicago law school, I discover), appeared on Second Life to promote his new book, Not a Suicide Pact. (I haven't read the book, but it is supposedly "controversial.")

I signed up to participate (there are limits on how many people can be in one place in SL), but couldn't make it. However, I read the transcript. What did I learn? Not that much:

• There is a limited selection of suits available for avatars.
• Not that many people turned up--the event was perhaps more PR than communication.
• There are people starting to think about the legal implications of virtual worlds.

But I'm sorry I missed it.

Travel to Hong Kong

I flew to Hong Kong today ... it is strange how while one might expect to cross my favorite ocean to get from the US to China, in practice, we never flew over open water. Instead, some beautiful views of Canada, Siberia, Mongolia, and China.

Grid in China

I'm participating today and tomorrow in the China-America Networking Symposium (CANS), which this year has a particular focus on grid. It's good to see friends from China, although several are not here because of visa problems. (A familiar, and painful, story.)

I've had the good fortune to visit China several times in recent years. In addition, we have hosted several visitors from China, and I also have some wonderful Chinese students. So I know a little about Chinese grid activities, which include several major deployments, including:

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.

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!