Ian Foster

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.

History and Theory of Infrastructure

I'm just back from a workshop on "History and Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Infrastructure" in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which brought together a fascinating group of social scientists and others to discuss "what practical lessons can the history, sociology, and experience of existing infrastructures offer to the imagination, implementation, and governance of cyberinfrastructure."

One delightful aspect of the meeting was meeting wonderful scholars that I had known previously only by reputation, such as Geoff Bowker, Leigh Star, Paul Duguid, and Christine Borgman, as well as some I already knew, such as Tom Finholt, Bob Kahn, Dan Atkins, and Bill Dutton, and others that I was glad to get to know.

There were many fascinating and wide-ranging discussions. My impressions:

• Social scientists (or at least those at the University of Michigan's School of Information) organize great meetings. The organizers had clearly put a lot of thought into how to structure the meeting to ensure useful discussion, and they also had excellent social events!
• The mode of discussion was quite different from I expected. There were no formal presentations and little analysis, but many compelling anecdotes. At first, I found this strange, but then realized that "stories" are a compelling way  of conveying insights. That got me thinking: what "stories" should we be telling people embarking on cyberinfrastructure projects, to help them avoid mistakes and achieve success?
• Another thought that seemed interesting, at least to me: How about designing cyberinfrastructure to collect the information that social scientists require to evaluate its utility? Large systems like TeraGrid, Open Science Grid, Earth System Grid, caBIG, or GEON, and also smaller systems, could be viewed as experimental apparatus for social scientists. What instrumentation should we include in them to that end?

Overall, I didn't come away convinced that the history of existing infrastructures can help those building cyberinfrastructure: railroads and networks are very different thing. But I became yet more convinced that social scientists have a lot to contribute to our understanding of how science and its tools will, and should, evolve in the 21st Century.

New Zealand Gets Wired

Having grown up in New Zealand, I am delighted that the country finally has a high-speed research and education network, the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN). Officially launched on August 31, this network links all of the major research institutions via a 10 Gbit/sec backbone.

The creation of a decent research infrastructure for New Zealand has taken a while. It's always going to be a challenge linking a country in which just 4 million people are spread over a fairly large area. However, while New Zealand has long had a high penetration of Internet technologies, things have been made worse by a lack of investment in research over the past 20 years, and by policies that have encouraged competition rather than cooperation among research universities and laboratories. Fortunately, these policies seem to be changing.

I've been thinking about these things since 2004, when I visited New Zealand and gave a series of talks to people involved in planning research infrastructure. I quoted Woody Allen: "80% of success is showing up", and pointed out that while the world is shrinking rapidly, it is not doing so uniformly. I noted that in 2004, I could send 1 terabyte (1 trillion bytes) to Geneva from Chicago in 20 minutes, but it took me four hours to download 1 megabyte (1 million bytes) from Chicago to Wellington. This difference reflects what we might call the dirty underside of exponentials: if network speeds are doubling every nine months, then a mere 10 years lag in network deployment means you are 10,000x slower than the competition. And in a world where one's ability to compete depends on access to information and colleagues, that difference can be fatal. Thus it's exciting to see that New Zealand has caught up--at least for a while.

I also spoke during that visit of the limiting effect of what I termed "PC Science," i.e., science scaled to fit on one's personal computer. Such limited approaches constrain the questions asked and the answers obtained. They can also (I fear) limit one's ability to enlist the best students, who are looking for things that are exciting and cutting edge. Fortunately, once you have high-speed networks, it becomes far more feasible to link users with clusters, supercomputers, databases, and collections of PCs to provide access to powerful computational capabilities. Thus I am also pleased to see my alma mater, the University of Canterbury, acquire a powerful supercomputer.

VO in Prague

I'm at the XXVIth Congress of the International Astronomical Union in Prague (a wonderful place), the triennial astronomy extravaganza. While the press coverage is all about whether Pluto gets to stay a planet (it seems that it will, sort of), a lot of the conference content is about virtual observatories (VOs). (I gave an invited talk on "Grid Technology and Multidisciplinary Science," which looked at connections between Grid and the VO world.)

The astronomy community has pioneered "service-oriented science" techniques for some time: see the nice article by Gray and Szalay for the basics. While the fact that their data is fairly simple and of no commercial value simplifies life relative to some other disciplines, it is still remarkable what they have achieved. Basically, they are developing services that provide access to a growing number of digital sky surveys at different wavelengths. Users can then access these services to look for (say) objects that are visible in the infra red but not the optical (=brown dwarfs), to stack up multiple instances of the same sort of obect (e.g., quasars) to improve signal to noise ratios, etc., all without leaving their desks. Furthermore, someone who develops an interesting analysis technique can in turn publish that as a service.

There are by now over a dozen VO projects around the world, and dozens of sky surveys are online. These sky surveys currently total tens of terabytes (10^12 bytes) of data; the next generation of instruments will generate petabytes (10^15 bytes) of data. These developments are rapidly transforming astronomy. It has already led to new scientific discoveries.

What makes this all possible is a small set of relatively simple but very important conventions The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), formed in June 2002, has played an important role in developing these.

We should all be studying how this community works, and working to replicate their successes elsewhere.