Ian Foster

Encounters at the End of the World

The most intriguing story I have come across in a while: German genius film director Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, ...) traveled with support from the US National Science Foundation to Antartica to make a film about the life of the scientists there, "Encounters at the End of the World." The web site writes:

There is a hidden society at the end of the world. One thousand men and women live together under unbelievably close quarters in Antarctica, risking their lives and sanity in search of cutting-edge science.

Now, for the first time, an outsider has been admitted. In his first documentary since GRIZZLY MAN, Werner Herzog, accompanied only by his camerman, traveled to Antarctica, with rare access to the raw beauty and raw humanity of the ultimate Down Under.

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, Herzog’s latest meditation on nature, explores this land of Fire, Ice and corrosive Solitude.

Premiere is in Toronto in September ... lucky Canadians.

Cloud Computing and Applications Workshop (CCA'08)

Bob Grossman and I are putting together a workshop on Cloud Computing and Applications (CCA), to be held in Chicago October 22 and 23. We have a distinguished organizing committee (see below), and will soon announce a number of invited speakers. If you'd like to present, please submit a position paper by August 1, as detailed on the CCA'08 Web site at www.cca08.org. From the call for contributions:

Dramatic growth in data and equally rapid decline in the cost of highly integrated clusters has spurred the emergence of the data center as the platform of choice for a growing class of data-intensive applications. To encourage conversations between those developing applications, algorithms, software, and hardware for such "cloud" platforms, we are convening the first workshop on Cloud Computing and its Applications (CCA'08). This workshop will include a mixture of invited and contributed talks on cloud computing, data intensive scalable computing, and related topics.

Topics of interest include:

• compute and storage cloud architectures and implementations
• map-reduce and its generalizations
• programming models and tools
• novel data-intensive computing applications
• data intensive scalable computing
• distributed data intensive computing
• content distribution systems for large data
• data management within and across data centers

If you would like to give a contributed talk, please submit a five page extended abstract by August 1, 2008.  These submissions will also be used to select papers for a poster session. Extended abstracts should be submitted to: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CCA2008

Organizing Committee ([email protected])

Charlie Catlett, Argonne National Laboratory
Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago
Garth Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University
Robert Grossman, University of Illinois at Chicago and Open Data Group
Joe Hellerstein, University of California at Berkeley
Tony Hey, Microsoft
Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo
Alex Szalay, Johns Hopkins University
Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame

Argonne is Number One ...

It is worth noting that Argonne's IBM Blue Gene system is officially the fastest supercomputer worldwide for open science, according to the June 2008 Top 500 rankings. It is also third fastest overall, after systems at LANL and LLNL used for nuclear weapons work. Many kudos to Ray Bair, Pete Beckman, and the rest of the team at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. (And to IBM too ...)

Some of my colleagues, notably Ioan Raicu, Zhao Zhang, and Mike Wilde, have been running large "many task" applications in biology and economics on this system, using Falkon and Swift. So far we're up to 32K of the total 160K cores, and it's a delight to work with.

Fascinating look at African higher education

I came across a fascinating and thought-provoking web site on higher education in Africa. I'll just quote from the first page directly to give an idea of its scope:

University enrollment rates in sub-Saharan Africa are among the lowest in the world, averaging 5%. International economists have often considered this fact irrelevant to Africa’s development and have advised African governments to reduce university budgets. However, the correlation between university enrollment rates and national income is strong (see Figure).
...

Low enrollment rates [in Africa] are not caused by lack of qualified applicants. Recent graduates of universities throughout Africa, surveyed in 2006, described exploding demand for higher education in most African countries, with overflowing classrooms and families pooling money to send one child to college. Rising demand means that students come from a wide range of family backgrounds and incomes. Universities in Africa, as anywhere, can be engines of social mobility.

This website presents the writings and experiences of these students and resulting recommendations for concrete policy actions to help 1) expand university access in Africa, 2) strengthen university education and training, and 3) retain university graduates.

Also interesting is the material on Computing and Online Knowledge. For example:

Access to the internet is so desirable to students in Africa that they spend considerable time and money to get it. Many students surveyed, with no internet connection at their universities, resorted to private, fee-charging internet cafes to study and learn. The fees are not small: several US$/hr, exceeding in many countries the average daily income. One student reports spending large amounts of time walking to the internet cafe because he could not afford both the internet fee and the taxi fare. (Imagine, by analogy, U.S. college students walking for hours and paying $100/hr to do optional reading). Connection to online knowledge is valued enough by students in Africa that they will make that sacrifice.

BEVO Report on Virtual Organizations Released

The report from the two workshops that Jonathan Cummings, Tom Finhiolt, Carl Kesselman, Katherine Lawrence, and I ran (with much help from Diana Rhoten) on "Building Effective Virtual Organizations" is now available on the BEVO website. The title is "Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations"--and that is what the report provides.

We lead off with the delightful quote from Arthur Mee, writing in the Strand Magazine in 1898:

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.

Of course things are not quite so simple (fortunately!)--but it is certainly true that the Internet has transformed the practice of science. This report explains why that it is so, reviews exemplar projects that illustrate the nature of this transformation, and explains what we need to do next to take virtual organizations to the next level.