High Performance Computing, e-Science and Scalable Architectures Next a Volcano

36 Students from Mexico and some countries of central america have begun the participation in the 2013 version of the Supercomputing and Distributed Systems Camp. This year, the SCCAMP is conducted at the Instituto Tecnológico de Colima, in the beautiful town of Villa de Alvarez in the Colima State, México. As in 2011, the SCCamp is developed near of a volcano: the Colima Volcano.

SCCamp is an initiative of researchers to offer to undergraduate and master students a state-of-the-art knowledge upon High Performance and Distributed Computing topics. In 2013 version, students will learn topics in 7 days summer school, starting from large-scale infrastructures (Cluster, Grid, Cloud) to CUDA Programming.  Instructors are from several countries in the world: Brazil, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, Mexico and Venezuela.

Past SC-CAMP were made in Colombia (2010), Costa Rica (2011) and Venezuela (2012). Every year an interesting special topic is proposed and selected. The special topic of this year is the use of reconfigurable architectures to scientific applications. 

The SCCAMP 2013  is supported by some international partners.  GridTalk and iSTGW are media partners of SCCAMP.

Searching for the spirit of cooperation at the EGI Technical Forum

The first day at the EGI Technical Forum brought together e-infrastructure’s movers and shakers to consider the future of grid, cloud and e-science. Not a small task then. Luis Busquets-Perez of DG-CONNECT at the European Commission set the scene by outlining the newly formed directorate’s mission to promote research and innovation, creativity, security and to provide digital goods and services – all in the spirit of cooperation. The e-Infrastructures Unit within it covers GÉANT, digital environments, HPC and grids. The Commission wants to avoid overlap of research in member states and promote cross-border collaboration. “Ideas are not like oranges,” said Busquets-Perez. “If I give you an orange, and you give me an orange, we both have an orange. If we swap ideas, we both have two ideas, not one.” Sharing of ideas is key – under Horizon2020, 100% of scientific results will be available through open access.

Steven Newhouse, Director of the European Grid Infrastructure also looked ahead to Horizon 2020, and EGI’s plans to build its activities around three themes: community and coordination, the operational infrastructure and virtual research environments.  One exciting new initiative is to recruit EGI champions to bring in new users at an institutional level, coordinated across Europe. This sort of scheme has worked successfully for XSEDE in the US, and in individual countries such as the UK, and EGI is looking forward to this initiative getting underway on a European basis.

Chiming with this future-facing theme, the conference yesterday hosted an EC workshop on distributed computing infrastructures for e-science. The participants were encouraged to do some crystal ball gazing – what does the future hold? What are the tough questions the community needs to find answers to?

One question that always rises to the top pretty speedily in these sorts of discussions is how to meet the needs of users? Antonella Galizia presented a case study from hydrometrology, using the example of a fatal flash flooding event that happened in Genoa in November last year. The same thing happened 40 years ago and researchers want to be able to predict these extreme rain and flooding events more accurately. DRIHMS was set up to provide an interplay between ICT and domain experts, providing simulation services, galleries of models and training. User-friendly interfaces were at the head of the list from users. “Users keep asking to make things as simple as possible,” said Galizia.

Andres Steijaert, provider of cloud services for  SURF,  a collaboration of research institutions and universities in the Netherlands, told us that “users are choosers”  - they choose their own software and devices, they want to bring along their own preferences to the party. According to Steijaert, the biggest question for users is what happens to their data? Individually, users rely on many clouds from different providers, fragmenting data and diluting their buying power. However, by clubbing together through SURF, this gives a potential market of 1 million users and companies like Amazon and Google are much more likely to pick up the phone to discuss user requirements. David Wallom of the Oxford e-Research Centre also stressed the need to be user centric – the ability to support the users is as important as buying the hardware in the first place.

A second theme that emerged is how much does it all cost? Fotis Karagiannis presented some preliminary results from the eFiscal project, which compared the costs of public and private distributing computing infrastructures. Early results show that in-house HPC and HTC  e-infrastructures are cost effective compared to commercial services, particularly when comparing on-demand costs. Personnel  represent about 50% of annual costs and the CAPEX/OPEX  ratio is 30/70. However, more benchmarking is needed, particularly when comparing performance. As Mike Symonds pointed out from Helix Nebula, the science cloud project, commercial providers also have to deal with the issue of charging VAT for their services. This is coupled with the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group’s considerations that cloud computing is not yet a solution for all scientific applications and the future is likely to be hybrid – public/private and grid/cloud/HPC. As Tiffany Trader reported from the conference in HPCinthecloud this morning, “The reports of grid's demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

e-ScienceTalk collaborating with ERINA+and Virtus!

e-ScienceTalk is working alongside two important projects.

In June 2012, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ERINA+. Evaluating impact is now an integral part of EU funded projects but deciding on appropriate metrics, and articulating the effects and benefits of a project can be quite a challenge.  This is where ERINA+ can provide guidance. The project is dedicated to helping standardise the way e-Infrastructure projects assess their socio-economic impacts and aims to make it far easier for projects to monitor and report their results. Over the last few months, the project has been refining its 'online assessment tool'. This online portal will allow individual projects to gather the right-kind of data and metrics in order to perform a self-evaluation. In my role as e-ScienceTalk's resident impact assessor, it will be really interesting to see the results of this work and their recommendations, which will be presented at the eChallenges Conference in the beautiful city of Lisbon in October. e-ScienceTalk is currently helping the ERINA+ team refine their ‘online tool’.



The other project that we have been working with, has helped e-ScienceTalk develop our 3-D virtual world within e-ScienceCity. This virtual island is hosted in the New World Grid, which is owned by a not-for-profit organisation, Virtus. e-ScienceTalk and Virtus recently formalised its relationship by signing a MoU. New World Grid is based on the Open Sim software, so those accustomed to Second Life or Open Sim will see many similarities. Since the launch of New World Grid in 2008 there has been 13,883 registered users. This avatar-enabled virtual venue being developed within e-ScienceCity, will be dedicated to not only e-science, but e-meetings and e-learning. The team are currently busy behind the scenes constructing the newest section for the City...and very soon visitors will be able to scale the heights of the HPC Tower to find out more about supercomputing and High Performance Computing.

Matching the needs of users: a life sciences perspective

Whether it’s for a bioinformatics application or for visualising cells at a molecular level, it is clear life science communities are increasingly calling upon exascale computational capabilities, simulation and modelling applications and e-infrastructures to accelerate their research. Although there is enormous potential for integration and modelling on a multi-scale level, it is surprising that life scientists are still not major users of the grid (approximately 11% of life scientists use PRACE and 15% using national computing centres, and less are using the Grid itself). So it's great to see that many projects presented at the EGI Community Forum this week, are helping non-experts to adopt the technology.

On Wednesday morning, we heard from Alexander Bovin about the WeNMR project, who are successfully growing their life science user base (http://www.wenmr.eu/). WeNMR is the first and largest Virtual Research Community to be supported by EGI within the life science area. WeNMR provide simple user-friendly access to Grid via web portals. Two dozen computational NMR services are available on the platform, and a number of applications for modelling macromolecules e.g. 3D Dart, Haddock. Users have access to various training resources (including wikis, online tutorials, a blog, a help centre, NMR and SAXS services).

The average life science researchers often doesn't come from a computing background, and hence choosing the most appropriate application software/architecture to fit their problem can prove difficult.  The ScalaLife  project (presented by Professor Erwin Laure from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm in Wednesday) is an ambitious initiative that hopes to provide a one-stop-shop knowledge-base and advice centre for the computational Life Science community. You can read more on the project in a blog entry yesterday from iSGTW journalist, Adrian Giordani. ScalaLife aims to help researchers by providing best practice, support and experience in order to help them develop more accurate structural and functional models, and in the longer-term could potentially have some impact in reducing the cost of generating new drugs.

Another project that resonated with me was ScienceSoft (http://sciencesoft.web.cern.ch/), which again is a new initiative to assist scientific communities in finding the software they need. The project is currently in a early scoping phase, but hopes to promote the development and use of open source software for scientific research. The project will provide a marketplace to match user needs to software products and services. Possible content could include catalogues, software services, a skills database, information on who likes what and why (a rating system), a peer review system as well as a citation system to allow software to be references in papers. At the moment, ScienceSoft is looking for ideas from community members, editors and developers to offer advice on where functionality is needed. GridCast interviewed Alberto Di Meglio about the initiative in a video featured yesterday afternoon. 

Getting ready for Oxford

It’s all been a bit busy here at the NGS this week as many of us are off to the AHM and e-science conference in Oxford next week. The NGS will be sharing a large double stand with our colleagues at GridPP so it should be fun!

We have some demos on the stand so be sure to pop past and see what’s going on. We have demos of the new UI/WMS, the Digital Library and SARoNGS on which we would really like your feedback.

The NGS will also be hosting a Birds of a Feather meeting on the Monday night 4.30pm - 6pm on the topic of "Services to support EU projects through the NGS" so come along!

So the stand rota is done, the leaflets are packed, the posters are printed, the stand presentation is almost done and the only thing that’s left now is to write my own talk that I’m giving on Tuesday!

Social Scientists interested in e-Science Communities in Latin America

Grid computing has caused changes in scientific interaction and develop new social communities. In fact, the interaction between remote, international, multicultural and interdisciplinary communities, around technological facilities, such as Grid computing, is unprecedented in the history of social science.

Nowadays, social scientists are interest in Grid Computing activities in behalf of the development of scientific networks and new scientific communities in different regions of the planet. In the past days, the Group of Research in Sociology of America Latina (GRESAL) at University of Grenoble, in France, has developed a conference-debate about the challenges and opportunities for the academic and scientific networks developed in Latin America.

Then, French sociologists invited Professor Luis Núñez de Villavicencio for this meeting. Luis Núñez de Villavicencio is a Venezuelan scientist, professor of the Universidad de los Andes at Mérida, Venezuela, scientific director of the Venezuela National Center of Advanced Computing (CeCalcULA) and one of the leaders and promoters of the academic and scientific networks in Latin America.

Latin American scientific networks based on Grid Computing, have allowed the interaction and participation of projects among countries than before, for political or economic reasons it was unthinkable to propose a collaboration. Indeed, this partnership around e-Science possibilities, allows the treatment of regional problems, and contribute to participate Latin American scientists in global projects. Latin America scientific networks developed in this context have enabled mutual understanding, with real transnational projects, and facilitate the dialogue between Latin America and the world.

e-Humanities at ieee

Today is the first proper day of the ieee conference and I’m currently in the e-Humanities workshop which is being chaired by Tobias Blanke from the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC) at Kings College London.

There have been some very interesting presentations this afternoon (I’m afraid that I missed the morning session) including 2 on the use of grid computing in linguistical analysis. There was an interesting presentation from TextGrid who are part of the D-Grid initiative in Germany. They are aiming to create a community grid for the collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts.

I missed the morning e-Humanities session as I was having a very interesting chat with Ann Borda from VeRSI. VeRSI is a multi-million dollar funded initiative in Australia which aims to provide a coordinated approach to accelerating the uptake of eResearch by Victorian researchers. I should point out that Victorian does not refer to a historical time period but to the state of Victoria in Australia!. The project is a collaboration between the University of Melbourne, Monash University, La Trobe University and the Department of Primary Industries.

They are funding some very interesting projects including neuroimaging, mouse brain map, dataset mining and much more. Details of all their projects can be found here.

Hello from Indianapolis

I'm currently at the ieee e-Science 2008 conference in Indianapolis. The actual conference proper doesn't start until Wednesday with Monday and Tuesday being taken up with tutorials and workshops.

I'm here at the conference venue a little bit early to get some work done ahead of my presentation in the workshop on "Project Management and User Engagement". My aim for today, as well as giving my presentation, is to see daylight at some point as it was dark when I left the hotel this morning and the workshop room has no windows!

I've been here since Saturday evening and my impressions of Indianapolis are mainly that it's cold! It didn't get above freezing yesterday and I'm very glad I brought a case full of thick winter clothing!