Crossing borders

It often occurs to me that humans like to draw up frontiers, and that we do so not to keep others out, but because it is more comfortable to set limits to stay within, to mark one’s own territory, so to speak. Governments have their borders, landowners their hedgerows and townsfolk their privet fencing. This is my domain they say. In that way they’re much like scientists. Each has their topics, their speciality, their niche and that’s that. Sadly it’s often not until you cross those borders that you find new perspectives and new opportunities.

Companies, individuals and technologies all need to leave their comfort zones in order to advance. The post-it note is a famous example of this: Back in 1968 Dr Silver, a scientist at 3M invented a low-tack reusable glue. The invention was by accident and thought to be interesting, but not significant –after all, the scientists had been trying to make ever stronger glues. It wasn’t until 1974 that another 3M colleague realised the potential – first with a sticky bookmark and later as the post-it notes we know today. It was this new perspective, not the underlying technology that made the difference.

So what has this got to do with Grids and clouds? Well it was a small study conducted by one of my colleagues, Adrian Mouat, from the BEinGRID project, and published on IT-tude.com's Grid Voices blog, that got me thinking about this. As he argued, the Grid was developed for science. Typical applications included large scale number-crunching in astronomy, particle physics, genome sequencing and so on. It crossed the boundary of academia into the realm of business and here evolved into the cloud. Could the cloud cross back over into the world of science, he wondered?

And what’s more, these thoughts of Adrian managed to cross another man-imposed frontier: between Europe and the United States. I was very pleased to see that this work of Adrian’s was picked up by the California-based grid and cloud focused HPCwire magazine and included in their HPC in the Cloud special edition published in November.

It is encouraging to see that people are probing such matters. Considering new uses, new perspectives, new ways of doing things, these are what drives innovation. It is equally encouraging to see that the significance of such thinking is recognised across borders. It is important that we don’t all think alike but it is equally important to remember to take that occasional look back from the other side of the fence.

Promoting open access to science: A report from the European Association of National Research Facilities seminar

-Bob Jones, EGEE project director

National governments and international organizations give a lot of money funding research facilities (labs, equipment, e-infrastructures) in the name of advancing science. In the midst of this – admittedly admirable – goal tricky questions arise:

- Which scientists get to use the facilities? What if their country of origin didn’t contribute funding?

-Who pays for the used resources?

- How open should “open access” be? Does this mean open to traveling researchers? Freely available data? Remote operation and control of experiments?

Earlier this week I attended a European Association of National Research Facilities (ERF) seminar in Lund, Sweden. This association promotes cooperation between individual European national large-scale research facilities laboratories, for example supporting research with neutrons, lasers, synchrotron light and ions.

I was at this seminar because ERF brings together key research facilities which are excellent potential partners for e-infrastructures such as Enabling Grids for E-sciencE and the European Grid Initiative. This one-day meeting featured a mix of plenary and parallel sessions. The plenaries were rapid, direct and frank – very refreshing for this type of event. The recurring theme of the day was that everyone present was in favour of open access, but the hosting states for research infrastructures often need to be convinced that it is to their benefit.

The major point of relevance for EGEE/EGI from this event is that the question of open access is important in its own right for e-infrastructures. As we move towards EGI and NGIs the national funding agencies will want to know how much of their ICT resources are used by foreigners and whether their researchers are getting equivalent treatment in other countries.

How can we do this? We must put in place the mechanisms so that we gather the necessary usage statistics to answer the questions that will be raised by the national funding agencies and make a convincing argument for “open access” to e-infrastructures.

A BREIN for business - an interview with John Brooke

Yesterday I spoke to John Brooke from the University of Manchester, who works on the BREIN (Business objective driven Reliable and Intelligent grids for real busiNess) project. BREIN's aim is to link business processes to grid computing. By taking the concept of "dynamic virtual organisations" and enhancing the system with methods from artificial intelligence, intelligent systems and the semantic web, BREIN hopes to enable businesses to easily and effectively use grid technologies.

The BREIN technology is currently being tested in two specific scenarios – in engineering and airports. In the first scenario ANSYS, a provider of engineering software, is working towards selling its software as a service rather than a product using the BREIN technology. The second scenario involves BREIN modelling processes in Stuttgart Airport (such as pilot timetables and shuttle bus scheduling) in an effort to reassign resources if, for example, a flight is delayed.

In a session yesterday at the eChallenges conference John explained how both grids and clouds were helping ANSYS and Stuttgart Airport. To make grids more accessible for business, BREIN is trying to bridge the paradigm between grids (sharing resources across boundaries) and clouds (virtualisation of resources). Their objective is to provide a model of switching between the resources, so that clouds can be treated as grids and a company such as ANSYS could easily outsource jobs to places such as Amazon rather than having to purchase more of its own computing power.

After the session John told GridCast a little more about BREIN and its work with grids, clouds and business..

GridCast: Do grids have a lot to offer business?

John: Yes I think so. The point about this project is that they've got a lot to offer business if they fit in with the business process. For example if you're paying for computing you want that model of payment to go on the normal accounting mechanism so that you don't have to develop a special means to pay, for example, Amazon. As far as [a business] is concerned it's like a normal cost budget item.

What we have in BREIN is a business logic, which is a high level logic – what the business wants to do. We then transfer that to the technical language - which is how do you do it. The fact that we've got this connection between the two means that if the business plan changes, the technical plan changes. So to give you the airport example, the business plan is that the airplane will land, the baggage will arrive, the tickets will be validated and, if you're hiring a bus, the airport will pay the bus company and will reclaim it from airport fees, etc. That's the business logic – it doesn't change if the plane's late. But if the plane is late the buses you actually get change, the times you get picked up change, so it's separating the business logic from the actual logic of implementation.

If we can get it right then we should be able to describe the business process in terms of our business ontology. And we have a way of mapping that down to the technical requirements. One of the big problems with grid is that it's all a bit technical so a company can't see how it relates to the normal way they evaluate a project, which is how much money they're spending and what's the benefit for their business. We think we're allowing them to integrate the use of computation in such a way that they can make that decision and all the technicalities are hidden. And that's a research aim because it's not completely established that that can be done.

GC: Where do clouds come into this?

J: Basically a cloud is a very good way of getting hold of resource cheaply and at short notice. So in the case of our engineering application probably the engineering firm doesn't want to buy a computer, possibly ANSYS doesn't want to buy a computer, but somebody like Amazon or Google have huge banks of computers. And Amazon's computers are heavily loaded at different times. If you think of the classic grid like EGEE, it's made by joining lots of clusters. So if you replaced one of those clusters with the Amazon cloud you've got the idea.

GC: What are the main challenges for this?

J: The main challenges are that people describe things in different ways. So let's say you've got an urgent need to run something by a particular date. One resource provider might give you something like 'termination by' while another might give you 'completion by'. If you compare those statements to find out if they're implicitly the same the answer is no they're not. But they clearly mean the same thing. So what we're trying to provide is the semantic technology where we can take a process, implement this in some ontology language and that can then be converted into things like xml files. You can then take those two statements, check them against your model and say look these are the same thing. So you can then switch from one provider using one language to another provider using another set of terms.

BREIN works on doing this dynamically. In the airport scenario we allow reasoning – we allow the plans to change. Let us suppose you've got a plan for a plane landing. Everything's worked out, you're going to get the buses on time, then you find out its delayed. You've got to re-plan. Not only that but you've got to do it dynamically because you don't have forever to re-plan, you've got to do it within a time constraint . If it's too late after the plane's landed then its no use getting results. You have to be able to dynamically reprovision all these things.

Thanks for talking to us John! For more information about the BREIN project, including a rather snazzy and illuminating video visit their site here.

It's always who you know ....

eChallenges is a slightly different conference to what I'm used to. Networking usually means downloading a DVDs worth of data in a second here it's slightly different. The breadth of ICT based research (note not ICT focussed) here at the conference has thrown up some great talks, workshops and contacts.

We always worry about clouds vs grids but it is obvious that people here only care that it works and having the stand has been great. I've talked to people from Manchester, Bostwana, Greece, Turkey (unsurprisingly), Germany and even Lesotho (OK I have to put my hands up never heard of there). I've handed out more business cards than I ever have at any other conference. Hopefully I have gained some good contacts to use in the future for attracting new users onto the grid (at least one great conversation about an entire completely new community).

The other stands have some interesting projects too, ranging from Korea's eGovernment and visualisations of civil amenitiess to 3D television and networks for business and IT alignment. In between all of this I have been trying to go to sessions but most of the real work seems to happen in the corridors.

Later days,
Neasan

Fighting fraud with grids

Continuing the grids in business theme, I went along to the 'Contracting in an eBusiness Environment' session yesterday which proved to be very enlightening. The talks in the session revolved around Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between computing resource providers and customers including an example as to how the commercial grid middleware GRIA is helping banks to fight the massive problem of money laundering.

Every year 1 trillion US dollars is laundered worldwide. The AMONG experiment (Anti money laundering in Grid) from BEinGRID is helping banks to cooperate in order to improve their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) mechanisms. As banks all have different AML systems, AMONG collaborates between these different platforms allowing for interorganisational sharing.

The GRIA SLA is set up to help ensure maximum security for this sensitive information. Among the measures in place is a limit on the number of queries between banking institutions – if this is exceeded the cost of a query greatly increases, discouraging malicious behaviour. All the SLAs correspond to unique grid accounts and also have set access controls. Find out more about AMONG here.

One of the other speakers at the session was John Brooke from the University of Manchester who is working on the BREIN (Business objective driven Reliable and Intelligent grids for real busiNess) project. I had a chat with John about BREIN and how grids can be used in business – watch out for the interview on GridCast later on today.

Digital Cities

Yesterday afternoon I hit the, initially at least, confusingly titled digital cities session. A digital city apparently "delivers high quality and high value services to its citizens and business community utilising ICT" (may not be an exact quote). This idea fascinates me as a digital consumer (more than most but probably less than some of the grid community). What can our cities/localities offer through ICT and where is leading the way?

The answer was a little surprising to me. Not London (I wish), New York or even Paris. No it is Trikale, in Greece, a small rural town with a population of just over 50,000 people. The town has free WiFi(95% geographical coverage), 35Km of fibre optic cabling, tele-medecine, online voting even dialogue between public servants and their constituents. They are now the lead partner in a new project Digital Cities which also includes Manchester and the subject of another talk at the session Almere.

Almere is a "new" Dutch city (finished in 1976) with a slightly larger population than Trikala, ~180,000. Their system is just as impressive as Trikala with all businesses and public institutions connected to fibre and by July 2010 100% of the houses (72,000) will also be connected. They are seen internationally as best practise for broadband provision having created 1,000 jobs in the ICT sector in the city and 1,000 more in local SMEs. The best bit is the cost, €15.5M. Which sounds like a lot till you learn that they gained €450M of extra investment in the city in consequence of their infrastructure.

London gets public use bikes next year hopefully we can get on with something slightly more high tech for the next public infrastructure upgrade.

Later days,
Neasan

EGEE at eChallenges

As Manisha has said EGEE, EGI and GridTalk are all here at eChallenges 2009 in Istanbul. The opening plenary was a bit special, wish I'd known that two of the talks were in Turkish (I may not have understood those) but the other two were a great opening to the day's sessions.

While the entire conference is underpinned by ICT the breadth of research on show is amazing with almost every academic (and industrial) discipline seemingly represented. I went along to the session on digital libraries and cultural heritage which was brilliant. It was case studies ranging from a collaboration digitizing entire churches (and their collections) using videos, 3D simulations and scanning documents to trying to record intangible cultural heritage such as tunes, dances, techniques and celebrations.

The last two talks in the session were a little more technology driven discussing the machinery of digitization. The first is a new machine for taking a picture of a document at 30 different wavelengths unveiling the unknown or unseen about a document. The second was new technology for stitching and blending high resolution images to form a large image which included a lot of detail but also a large field of view.

The rest of the week promises to be just as interesting and hopefully we can form some new relationships for our community with the people and projects here (already had a few people take and give business cards hope NA4 are ready).

Later days,
Neasan

New GridBriefing on technology transfer

One of the focuses of eChallenges is how to encourage industry to make better use of ICT developments. So it's the perfect place for GridTalk to release its 9th GridBriefing - which focuses on how grid technologies can be used outside the academic arena - particularly in the commercial world.

Grid technologies can help organisations in both the public and private sector provide enhanced processing power, access distributed resources and form stronger collaborations. Although transferring both the technologies and expertise created by the grid community isn't always easy, a number of projects are working towards putting grid in business.

GridTalk's new GridBriefing takes a look at the issues involved on the road to adoption of grid technologies, featuring case studies and opinions from those working towards realising this aim. The briefing can be downloaded for free at the GridTalk website.

GridTalk at eChallenges

Today marks the first day of the eChallenges e-2009 conference in Istanbul which aims to stimulate rapid take-up of Research and Technology Development results by industry and help open up the European Research Area to the rest of the world. In particular delegates are encouraged to share knowledge and experience, lessons learnt and good practice in the following areas.

- ICT for Networked Enterprise & RFID
- eGovernment & eDemocracy
- eHealth - Services to Citizens
- Collaborative Working Environments
- Living Labs
- Digital Libraries and Cultural Heritage
- Intelligent Content and Semantics
- High Performance Computing
- eInfrastructures
- Networked, Smart and Virtual Organisations
- Mobility
- Security and Identity Management
- Technology Enhanced Learning and ICT Skills

GridTalk is here with both EGI and EGEE who we're sharing a stand with. One coffee break in, and we've already had lots of interest from delegates about what we do and how we're able to collaborate with others to share the benefits of grid technologies. Add to that a varied conference programme and the fact we're in Istanbul, and it looks like it's going to be an interesting and fruitful three days.

A Belief in eInfrastructures

I'm here at the 7th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting, organised by the Belief project. We are already on the 2nd day. The first day was a great mixture of discussions, presentations and networking. The opening plenaries from Kostas Glinos and Carlo Rizzuto were brilliant overviews of the current and future plans for e-Science in Europe.

The most interesting session for me however was "Towards e-Science services" three talks with three very diverse viewpoints on the topic. The best talk for me in this session was Paul Wouter from the Virtual Knowledge Studio. The VKS tries to bring together social scientists, humanities researchers, information technology experts and information scientists to provide insight in the way e-research can contribute to new research questions and methods. It was great to get a humanities view of "our" world.

After lunch I went to the Data service for user communities parallel track in the afternoon which had my favourite comment so far. Heard from the audience "Once we stop calling them e-Infrastructures and start just being Infrastructure have we won?".

We've already had today's plenary (and wrap up from the parallel sessions) and and now in a session on e-Science environments and interfaces so better get back to that.

Later days,
Neasan

Data sharing at the BELIEF e-concertation meeting

We're at the BELIEF 7th e-infrastructure concertation meeting in Brussels which is now on its second day. This event brings together the e-Infrastructure community in order to take stock of the current developments and to discuss future orientations.

With around forty speakers over three days, the event's certainly been lively so far and there's been lots of engaging discussion in the sessions, around lunch and coffee and also on the conference forum.

One point the meeting aims to address is the challenge of developing data infrastructures for e-Science, and this has been a reoccurring theme throughout the conference. At yesterday's session on Data services for user communities this was at the forefront of the discussion with delegates highlighting the importance of putting the users needs first.

The session encouraged delegates to discuss the following four questions, and with 50 participants and 7 talks there was a lot of healthy dialogue.

- What do scientists expect from e-Infrastructures?
- How to assist the transition from science to e-science?
- How to engage with user communities?
- Where and how to invest in R&D

Participants thought that the answer to the second and forth questions could be achieved by unlocking the power of data. However this is easier said than done and needs to be carried out in a demand driven way that is easily accessible to users who will have to use these tools and platforms every day in their work.

There were calls for users to have 'access ramps' rather than 'access steps' which discourage them from using tools and services which provide them with extra work, rather than facilitating research they're already carrying out. This reflected a talk given earlier on in the day by Andrew Richards of the UK's National Grid Service, who suggested an Oyster card system of accessing grid-like services rather than the complicated certificate system which often proves to be a barrier to use. (For non-Londoners an Oyster card is a ticket which gives you access to all buses, trains and tube services across the city in a very easy to use way).

And regarding engaging communities - as well as the importance of dissemination projects like BELIEF and of course GridTalk :) - delegates suggested that going out to meet researchers in their own environments at science conferences and the like, could do much to encourage a wider uptake of e-science services.

Cloud computing at ITU Telecom World, Geneva

This week Geneva played host to the impressive ITU Telecom World 2009, an event held only every few years and of significant importance to the telecommunications and ICT sectors. Attracting its fair share of world leaders, it has created quite a media splash – this is the first event I’ve attended that featured a special lounge marked ‘Heads of State’ (and no, they wouldn’t let me in).

The CERN booth was a lot busier than some of the larger, slightly shinier contributions, whose extensive marbled floors had a tendency to look rather empty. The CERN booth on the other hand, was packed with visitors finding out more about the LHC and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.

Given the buzz around cloud computing at EGEE’09 a couple of weeks ago, I was interested to hear the telecom community’s take on the subject. A distinguished panel of experts from IBM, Cisco, Oracle, Hitachi, email security firms and SMEs gave an extremely packed room their definitions of ‘what is cloud computing?’ and considered European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding’s recent question – can cloud computing bring us out of the credit crunch?

So according to business leaders, what is cloud computing? A way of getting computer needs on demand – a bit like getting water piped to your home, but paying by the drink, not the bottleful was one summary. For Mike Hill, of IBM, it was more a question of ‘cloud economics’, which have several key characteristics – pay-as-you-go consumption, lower costs through virtualisation, customer self service and automated service management software to reduce labour costs.

The panel also discussed some of the barriers to adoption. The general opinion was that psychology was at the root of reluctance to push data and processes out into the cloud. Customers want the new service to be more reliable and more secure than what they already have, probably an unreasonable expectation. Generally, the panel agreed that SMEs and consumers would be the ‘first to fall’. After all, who doesn’t have a webmail account? Larger companies have more invested in their current infrastructures and may need more reassurance to make use of cloud resources for sensitive data. However, as Jay Chaudhry of Zscaler pointed out, there’s no need to ‘boil the ocean’, even big companies can put a toe in the water with email or customer relations management tools, before casting a whole data centre into the drink.

And is cloud computing the Holy Grail to solve the credit crunch? Figures for the potential size of the market varied – some said around 50 billion dollars, some up to 800 billion by 2013. A note of caution when bandying around these numbers, the full costs of your current solution shouldn’t be underestimated, don’t forget to include all the labour and training costs as well as the hardware bill you’re saving. However, with software development growing at only 3% per year, and cloud at 30% there’s clearly something in it – as Duncan Stewart of Deloitte Canada put it: “At the moment, cloud computing is somewhere between ‘hype’ and ‘hyper’.”

Nature Networking with iSGTW

What’s the best part about conferences? Networking with colleagues is the usual reply when we ask delegates this question, often accompanied by a sigh that there is never enough time to catch up with everyone you want to. So how can you keep in touch in between conferences to have those grid-related ‘water cooler’ conversations?

International Science Grid This Week now has an electronic forum on Nature Networks designed to encourage just this type of discussion. Nature Networks is an online scientific community moderated by the journal Nature. It’s non-profit and non-proprietary. Anyone can read the posts, just go to “iSGTW: grid computing, and more…”. To add your own posts, you can simply register and join in. (You can find details in the FAQ section).

Today’s threads ask: Is the cloud just a grid with a business model? What is the next killer app in computing? Why has magnetic tape hung around so long? Add your opinions on these threads, share your views on iSGTW articles or pose that burning question you’ve never had the chance to ask your colleagues. We’ll look forward to hearing from you!

Weaving together language archives and technology

--Guest posting by Bob Jones, EGEE project director

Europe has an abundance of digital archives that are very interesting to social science and humanities researchers, but the problem is access, access, access. The solution?

One of the ESFRI projects present at the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE conference in Barcelona last month, CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is a large pan-European collaborative effort to create, coordinate and make language resources and technology available and readily usable. CLARIN will give scholars tools for computer-aided language processing. It aims to

(1) unite existing digital archives in Europe that contain language based material;
(2) make language and speech processing tools available to interested researchers, opening up new research avenues;
(3) give web based services to non-expert users (especially humanities and social sciences researchers without a technological background), making complex tasks possible for materials contained in the archives, such as ‘Summarize Le Monde of March 17 2008 — in Polish’. [Example from first issue of CLARIN’s newsletter.]

I attended the Networking Event for European Research Infrastructure (NEERI09) in Helsinki, 1-2 October 2009: This workshop focused on planning for CLARIN’s technology components. I noticed similarities between the classifications of CLARIN data centres and the tiered system of the World LHC Computing Grid. If this holds true, the it is possible that CLARIN centres could operate within the frame work of the National Grid Infrastructures that will be part of the European Grid Initiative (EGI) and that CLARIN users could be supported through the proposed humanities specialized support center (SSC).

After presentations and discussions about open access to research material and copyright issues, CLARIN representatives agreed to prepare a proposal for a common approach to open access to copyrighted material across the ESFRI projects.

It is excellent to see the talks with ESFRI projects from EGEE’09 already yielding real collaboration!

- - - - - - - -

Note, some of the interesting points for EGEE/EGI about CLARIN:

• This community needs ‘Persistent Identifiers’ (rather than temporary URLs) and metadata. A couple of consortia across Europe and the USA are making strides in developing services for registering and storing Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) based on handles. If these services prove useful to projects such as CLARIN then EGI and its grid middleware will have to be able to use PIDs if it wants to work with and support this community.
• eduGAIN is being considered as the basis for Authorization and Authentication Infrastructure by CLARIN and related ESFRI projects. Interoperability of such identity federations with the AAI federations in EGI will be necessary.
• The Direct User Support groups of EGEE/NA4 are in contact with CLARIN to help them prototype use of grid facilities for a specific use case.
• The operation and support models of EGEE/EGI and DEISA are looking more similar which should simplify the steps necessary for interoperation.
• A white paper “Strategy for a European Data Infrastructure” (http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/news/news/parade_white_paper) prepared by PARADE (Partnership for Accessing data in Europe) was distributed by Kimmo Koski at the end of the event.

You can see my slides from the event covering EGEE, EGI and how CLARIN’s needs could map onto what we have today (link: https://edms.cern.ch/file/1029605/1/NEERI-BobJones-Oct09.pptx) .

World Community Grid projects

The latest at World Community Grid is that three projects are transitioning from their phase one to phase two. This means they are running new research code for these second phases and we need to get that code modified for Boinc, security audited, tested, and build a modified screen saver for each. The "Discover Dengue Drugs Together" project is screening a large number of chemical compounds for their effectiveness in disabling a particular enzyme the virus needs to spread in the body. Actually it is looking at a class of viruses called flaviviruses that include Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Hepatitis C, yellow fever and other less known viruses. The first phase used a program from the Scripps Institute called "AutoDock" to identify a couple thousand most likely drug candidates. The second phase will use a program from Harvard called "CHARMM" which will perform a more precise screening of these candidates, which takes considerably more CPU time per candidate. Using this two phase approach reduces the total CPU requirement needed for the project. For phase one, the project has used 11,737 cpu-years of computer time. We will be starting phase 2 very soon. The "Influenza Antiviral Drug Search" is doing the analogous thing for drug resistant strains of the flu virus and is also going to start its phase 2 shortly. Meanwhile, the Clean Energy Project, which is looking for new polymer compounds that might be used to make less expensive and more efficient solar cells, is nearing its phase two as well. Even though the Clean Energy Project used CHARMM for its phase one, we still needed to do some work on it because it is used slightly differently for the virus projects. As a result, this is a busy period behind the scenes at World Community Grid. Our beta testing volunteers should see quite a bit of activity over these weeks.