Ian Foster

Research in Paradise

This was the title of a talk I gave in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago, at Running Hot, a conference for young New Zealand scientists. (The slides are mostly images, so may not be too illuminating.) It was a great meeting. Participants from every field of science and speakers ranging from the Chief Scientific Advisor for Scotland to the Dean of Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland discussed what it means to be a working scientist, and to support science, in a country of 4M people.

In my talk I discussed the impact of information technology on the practice of science:

Impressed with the telephone, Arthur Mee* predicted in 1898 that if videoconferencing could be developed, 'earth will be in truth a paradise.' Since his time, rapid technological change, in particular in telecommunications, has transformed the scientific playing field in ways that while not entirely paradisical, certainly have profound implications for New Zealand scientists. The Internet has abolished distance, as Mee also predicted–a New Zealand scientist can participate as fully in online discussions as anyone else, and their blog can be every bit as influential. Exponential improvements in networks, computing, sensors, and data storage are also profoundly transforming the practice of science in many disciplines. But those seeking to leverage these advances become painfully familiar with the 'dirty underbelly' of exponentials: if you don't constantly innovate, you can fall behind exponentially fast. Such considerations pose big challenges for the individual scientist and for institutions, for researchers and educators, and for research funders. Some of the old ways of researching and educating need to be preserved, others need to be replaced to take advantage of new methods. But what should we preserve? What should we seek to change?

(*) Arthur Mee was a remarkable fellow, known to many in the British Commonwealth (but not, I think, in the US) through his wonderful Childrens' Encyclopedia.

Midwest Grid School @ Chicago, September 17-19

Alina Bejan just posted the following announcement:

MidWest Grid School (MWGS'08) -- Call for Participation

Please JOIN US for an exciting 3-day course in large-scale and high-performance grid computing to take place Sep 17-19, 2008, at University of Chicago, Chicago IL.

The Open Science Grid (OSG), a major national grid infrastructure, provides scientists with more than 70 production sites offering over 20,000 CPUs and 4 Petabytes of storage to advance their research. This organization includes members from particle and nuclear physics, astrophysics, bioinformatics, gravitational-wave science and computer science collaborations, all contributing to the development of the OSG and benefiting from advances in grid technology. Applications in other areas of science, such as mathematics, medical imaging and nanotechnology can also gain from the interactions with OSG through its partnership with local and regional grids or their communities’ use of the Virtual Data Toolkit software stack.

We invite you to learn more about grid and high throughput computing and its implications in various research areas through this intensive OSG course that introduces the techniques of grid and distributed computing for science and engineering with hands-on training in the use of large-scale grid computing resources.

The workshop will focus on enabling the use of OSG and TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure to perform large-scale computations and data-intensive processing in different application domains. Participants will learn how to use grids of thousands of processors and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after the course completion.

The workshop will cover:

* Overview of distributed computing concepts and tools
* Concepts, tools, and techniques of grid computing
* Discovering and using grid resources
* Grid scheduling and distributed data management
* Techniques for workflow and collaboration

Target audience:
Undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, educators and professionals in engineering, computer science, or any scientific, data-or computing-intensive discipline may apply.

Important deadlines:

Application Deadline: Aug 30, 2008 -- now OPEN (please visit website to apply)
Notification Deadline: Sep 5, 2008
Registration Deadline: Sep 15, 2008

For more information and to apply, please visit www.opensciencegrid.org/workshop

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.

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.

Writing from GlobusWorld/OSGC in Oakland

I am attending this week the Open Source Grid and Cluster conference in Oakland, California. This event includes GlobusWorld, Sun Grid Engine workshop, and Rocks workshop, as well as tracks on other open source grid and cluster software.

As an organizing committee member, it is always a little nervewracking ahead of a meeting, wondering how it will work. We're now in the third day and I am please to say that the meeting is going very well. The sessions are well attended and there is lots and lots of discussion and questions, both during and between talks. (At this very moment, I am in a session that is running 15 minutes over as attendees miss the break for a demonstration of Taverna and Globus.) In addition, the Marriott in Oakland turns out to be a beautiful location.

For those not fortunate enough to be at the meeting, the talks are being made available online.

Last Chance to Register for Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference!

Due to popular demand from procrastinators, we we have extended until Monday May 5 the advance registration deadline for the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference.

If you haven't registered, now is the time to do so to get the off-site registration rate of $490.

If you haven't decided to come, take a look at http://www.opensourcegridcluster.org to see the outstanding content we've assembled, on Globus, Rocks, SGE, and other tools, and take the plunge.

10 Reasons to Attend Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference

Ok, I admit it is corny--but I assembled a list of 10 reasons why you should attend the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference, to be held in Oakland May 12-16 (www.opensourcegridcluster.org).

1) Globus program is fantastic, including tutorials, advanced technical presentations, contributed talks, and community events on every aspect of Globus.

2) Gobs of other material on Sun Grid Engine and Rocks, and other open source grid and cluster software.

3) Gathering: A great opportunity to meet colleagues, peers, collaborators from the grid and cluster community. The only grid meeting in the US the rest of this year--the next two OGFs are in Spain (June) and Singapore (September).

4) GT4.2: You'll get to learn about the exciting new features in Globus Toolkit 4.2. New execution, data, security, information, virtualization, and core services.

5) Gratfication (immediate) as you get to provide your input on future directions for Globus, Sun Grid Engine, Rocks, and other open source systems--and maybe sign up to contribute to those developments.

6) Grid solutions: You'll get to meet the people using Globus to build enterprise grid solutions in projects like caBIG, TeraGrid, Earth System Grid, MEDICUS, and LIGO, and learn about solution tools like Introduce, MPI-G, Swift, Taverna, and UniCluster.

7) Gurus: You get to grill the Globus gurus--or, if you prefer, show off your own Globus guru status.

8) Great price: $490 registration is substantially cheaper than OGF or HPDC, for example, and the hotel rate is reasonable ($149).

9) Gorgeous location: Oakland is easy to get to -- SFO (with easy BART  train ride), Oakland, and San Jose airports also nearby. Just a 10 minute train ride to download San Francisco. A lovely time to be in the Bay Area.

10) Gorilla and guerilla free: None of the corporate marketing talks that diluted the last GridWorld conference--apart from two sponsor talks, this is pure tech, and highly useful tech at that.

We look forward to seeing you in Oakland!

Regards -- Ian.

Services for Science

I gave a talk on Services for Science (PDF, PPT) at the INGRID 2008 conference in Ischia, Italy, on Wednesday. I decided to do something different and include demonstrations. I think this worked well. I created and deployed a GT4 service using Introduce and gRAVI, and then created and ran a workflow invoking GT4 services using Taverna.  Well, to be honest, there was some steps I skipped along the way (in the style of Julia Childs), but nevertheless I found it impressive how much could be done interactively, in a short time. In summary, I was able to show how we can:

1. Create a new service using the Introduce integrated development environment, defining operations and resource properties, folding in required functionality (e.g., security, notification), and selecting types from both base types and predefined libraries. (Using gRAVI we can also encapsulate executables.)
2. Publish this service into registries (GT4 index services).
3. Discover available services.
4. Compose services into workflows, e.g., via the use of Taverna, which thanks to recent work by Wei Tan and Ravi Madduri (and much help from the Taverna team) can now invoke GT4 services.
5. Deploy and publish the workflow in turn ...

Grid Summer School

The sixth in the highly successful series of International Summer  Schools on Grid Computing will be held at the Hotel Füred Conference and Congress Centre of Balatonfüred, Hungary, from 6th to 18th July 2008.

The School will include lectures, discussions, laboratory sessions, tutorials and group work delivered by leading authorities in the fields of advanced grid technology, applications of e-Science and distributed systems research. Reports from world leaders in deploying and exploiting Grids will complement lectures from research leaders shaping future e-Infrastructure.

Hands-on laboratory exercises will give students experience with widely used Grid middleware. The school will conclude with an integrating practical that will enable students, working in teams, to bring together all they have learnt on an extended exercise that simulates collaborative research using e-Infrastructures. Indeed during the school, participants will meet like-minded students from many parts of the world, working in many disciplines, and form valuable long-term working relationships.

We invite applications from enthusiastic and ambitious researchers who have recently started or are about to start working on Grid projects. Students may come from any country. We expect participants from computer science, computational science and any application discipline. The School will assume that students have diverse backgrounds and build on that diversity. However, in order to fully participate in the practical exercises you should be a confident programmer who will have fulfilled certain prerequisites.

To find further details visit the web site at: http://www.issgc.org

Inaugural Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems

I've been talking a lot recently to colleagues in the social sciences, following a workshop on virtual organizations that I ran for NSF with Carl Kesselman, Tom Finholt, and Jonathan Cummings. If I may say so myself, it was a great meeting--certainly not the "same old" discussions (at least from my perspective). The Building Effective Virtual Organizations (BEVO) workshop is a next step in this process.

Co-organizer Tom Finholt now points me at the Inaugural Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems, designed for graduate students and new faculty, which sounds like a lot of fun.