Content about Opinion

iSGTW reader Harvey Newman gives his perspective on SC10.

Interview - Kostas Glinos peers into his crystal ball

Image courtesy Corentin Chevalier, eScienceTalk

Kostas Glinos is a member of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Information Society and Media — and he just presented the European Grid Initiative with a 25-million euro contract in a brief ceremony onstage at the start of the EGI Technical Forum on 14 September. iSGTW caught up with him afterward, during a coffee break held in the middle of the poster session floor. We asked him about the significance of the EC’s backing, his hopes for EGI, and his ideas as to what it all means for the future.
iSGTW: What was the significance of the contract presentation today?Glinos: EGI is the culmination of an effort over eight years to look for a sustainable, long-term commitment from European countries, supplemented by the European Commission (EC). Of a projected 73 million euro cost, 25 million is coming from the EC, with the rest from member states. We n

Feature - One person’s view, behind the scenes of middleware

EMI tries to pull together three different middlewares. Image courtesy EMI

John White, security team leader of EMI, discusses his work.iSGTW: Can you explain to me what EMI stands for?White: European Middleware Initiative. EMI unifies under one project the three middlewares that have been put together over the past six years: gLite, ARC and Unicore.
Each of these middleware do different things; for example, Unicore runs inside high-performance computing centers like a ‘monster’ supercomputer, while gLite typically runs over a distributed system, such as a farm of 1,000 or 2,000 batch nodes — which can be anything from a cluster of batch nodes or a group of white, ‘pizza box’ type home-PCs. We used to have these at CERN up until a few years ago.iSGTW: What is your role?White: I have a few roles; my most important is as security area leader of the security components of all three midd

Opinion - Scientists, meet the citizens

Screenshot from the Foldit online game for protein folding. Image courtesy Foldit

François Grey is the coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Center.
In a week’s time, an unusual meeting of minds will occur in London.
Billed as a Citizen Cyberscience Summit, it will bring together scientists from a range of distributed, volunteer computing and volunteer thinking projects, to mingle with some of the volunteers who participate in these online projects.
The upshot of the event, hosted by King’s College London on 2-3 September, should be a stimulating dialogue about how to make citizen cyberscience even more compelling for the public and even more useful to science.
The timing of the event could not be better. August saw a bumper crop of major scientific results from online science projects involving public participation. An article in Nature described progress made in protein folding using an online multiplayer game called

Q & A - John Shalf talks parallel programming languages

As with parallel programming languages, a lexicon of moves designed for jugging in pairs would help these jugglers plan their performances. Image courtesy Dave Herholz, CC 2.0

Whether on a grid, cloud, or cluster, today’s science software runs in parallel, executing many calculations simultaneously. Programmers have found many ways to create parallel programs in traditional programming languages. Nevertheless, today there are a number of emerging languages that are designed specifically for programming in parallel. To learn more about these unusual programming languages, iSGTW caught up with John Shalf, the team lead of the Advanced Technologies Group at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
iSGTW: Thanks for joining us today, John.
Shalf: It’s my pleasure to talk to you.
iSGTW: We’ve heard about parallel programming languages. Could you explain to us what that is?
Shalf: A sequentia

Q&A: Peer-reviewed physics, at the speed of light

Sergio Bertolucci during an interview with a member of the Swedish press. Image courtesy Corentin Chevalier, GridTalk

Sergio Bertolucci is the director for research and computing at CERN. Over the noise of nearby cathedral bells chiming the hour, iSGTW caught up with him on the steps of the University Building in Uppsala during a coffee break at the EGEE User Forum. We asked him about the spate of new papers coming out from the LHC, and what it all means for science.iSGTW: We have heard that a lot of papers have already been published in the time since the start-up of the LHC. Is that right?Bertolucci: Four papers on high-energy physics have already published, and 15 are in preparation as of today, April 14, all based on the collisions that just happened.One week after the first collisions, the first papers were published electronically. And these were all peer-reviewed.
 
iSGTW: That’s very fast, compared to the some

Opinion: What would Linnaeus do?

Carl Linnaeus on his wedding day, holding in his right hand a specimen of Linnear borealis — his favorite plant, said Magnus Lidén, curator of the Uppsala University Botanic Garden. Image courtesy Uppsala University Art Collection

Elizabeth Leake of TeraGrid — the high-performance, distributed computing network in the USA — was a guest at the EGEE User Forum, the recent conference in Europe on high-throughput computing. Here, she gives her impressions about a technology challenge faced by both types of computing: Long-term, persistent storage.
 
One of the highlights of visiting the conference venue in Uppsala, Sweden, was learning about Carl Linnaeus.
Born in nearby Råshult in 1707, Linnaeus  moved to the college town of Uppsala to study, and quickly became a cornerstone of the university. He died in 1778 and was laid to rest in Uppsala Cathedral — largest in all of Scandinavia.
Linnaeus was fam

Opinion - Challenges to exascale computing

Irving Wladawsky-Berger retired in May 2007 after 37 years at IBM. Today he is a visiting lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, a senior fellow at the Levin Institute of the State University of New York, and an adjunct professor in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School.

Supercomputing has been a major part of my education and career, from the late 1960s when I was doing atomic and molecular calculations as a physics doctorate student at the University of Chicago, to the early 1990s when I was general manager of IBM's SP family of parallel supercomputers.
The performance advances of supercomputers in these past decades have been remarkable. The machines I used as a student in the 1960s probably had a peak performance of a few million calculations per second or megaflops. Gigaflops (billions) peak speeds were achieved in 1985, teraflops (trillions) in 1997,

Feature - Q&A: Grid Colombia warms up

A group photo at an Open Science Grid-sponsored Grid Colombia workshop, which took place in October 2009. Image courtesy of Open Science Grid.

With a little help from colleagues at Open Science Grid and EGEE (via EELA-2), Colombia is on the cusp of launching its first national grid infrastructure. iSGTW caught up with Jose Caballero to learn more about the present and future of this promising project. Caballero currently does software development for ATLAS, and serves as the OSG liaison to South America. Previously, he spent five years working with the gLite grid software for the CMS experiment.
iSGTW: How did Grid Colombia get started?
Caballero: EELA-2 (E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America) chose Colombia to host one of its main conferences in 2008, and that brought the worldwide grid movement to the attention of both academia and government in Colombia. After that, universities started to study the creation of a national

Opinion - Volunteering for a better world: harnessing technology and willing citizens

Firefly in the daytime. Image courtesy Museum of Science, Boston.

By using the strengths of distributed computing technologies, both specialized researchers and citizens have the opportunity to participate in a new way of doing science.
We live in a time when nearly all information is available to nearly all people everywhere.
We are entering an age where all types of people can also contribute to many types of information. A school bus driver in rural Romania may be part of a biomedical research project. Or a banker in Los Angeles might moonlight as a collaborator in an astronomy project – classifying galaxies in her spare time.
This new movement in science, called “citizen science,” allows non-specialist volunteers to participate in global research. The projects are as diverse as backyard insect counts (the Firefly citizen science project), studies of how malaria develops and

Opinion: Supporting the arts and humanities with e-science

There’s a reason why certain tools become classics, almost indispensable for everyday life. Image courtesy Annette Gulick, stock.xchng

Supporting really useful general tools is often the best way to support specialists, says EGEE’s Danielle Venton.
The early days of the World Wide Web were primarily an exclusive, though not a closed, party. Its main attendees were elites in the physics and computer science communities.
Today, the bulk of the developed and developing world is involved. Every sector of society puts the Web to use: your local dance company, church and city council likely all have Web sites. Through these you can learn about and communicate with them in ways not possible before.
Similarly, managing data with e-Infrastructures (distributed computing systems and the like) was, like the Web, initially confined to specialized communities. Today, however, nearly all researchers, including those in the a

Feature - New Year Predictions

This week marks the beginning of a new decade. What does the future hold for eScience? To find out, iSGTW spoke with experts from all walks of eScience. Here’s what they had to say.

François Grey
Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University, Beijing
Expertise: Citizen cyberscience

What do you think will be the big story or trend within your area of expertise in 2010? Within the area of citizen cyberscience, expect to see a big growth of projects that invite volunteers to contribute via their smart phones. The switch to this platform for volunteer computing - and above all volunteer thinking - is going to enable far greater public participation in science.
What do you think will be the big story or trend within e-science as a whole in 2010? The developing world will catch up with the industrialized world, and in many areas overtake it when it comes to exploiting distributed computing and other d