Grid Content Evolution & Management

1. Grid Content Evolution & Management Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing

2. Grid Content Evolution & Management:Enabling e-Science for the Rest of Us • Thilo Ernst • Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology (Thilo.Ernst@first.fhg.de) • Jochen Wauer • DLR Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing

3. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer Scientific Software Just A Mouse Click Away (1) • A 1968 vision: • ... Back to our hypothetical user. He seats himself at his console [...]. He dials his local computer and 'logs in' by presenting his name, problemnumber, and password to the monitor program. He calls for either a public program, one of his own programs, or a colleague's program that he has permission to use. The monitor links him to it, and he then communicates with that program... - J.C.R. Licklider, "The Computer as a Communication Device" (Director, ARPA-Information Processing Techniques Office) • Did he just mean telnet?

4. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer e-Science – a contemporary Definition • „e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.“ • „large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation“ • „The Grid is an architecture proposed to bring all these issues together and make a reality of such a vision for e-Science“ • „e-Science will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken“ (*) • (Source: UK Research Council e-Science Core Programme)

5. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer The entire story? • Grid computing / e-Science still focus on high-demand, large-scale applications • Evolution: high performance computing  Grid computing  e-Science renders an emphasis on such applications understandable • But when mature Grid & e-Science technologies are available they will likely be attractive to, a wealth of smaller (and computationally less demanding) research efforts - e-Science will become ubiquitous (*) • But for this to happen, these technologies must develop additional characteristics unrelated to the original HPC focus of the Grid movement

6. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer Scientific Software Just A Mouse Click Away (2) • 2003: Are we there? • Internet & WWW are ubiquitious and have revolutionized the exchange of scientific information • But progress w.r.t. scientificsoftware lacks behind when compared with the ease of accessing scientific documents today • „Reuse by download“: requires installation or even porting – limiting factor for broad exchange • Distributed computing technologies exist (remote shells, CORBA, Java-RMI, Web Services) but there is no reliable, ubiquitous infrastructure to which Licklider‘s request could be addressed. Answer: No.

7. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer Scientific Software Just A Mouse Click Away (3) • ... New question: Why? • in much of real life science • (non-Computer) Scientists, beyound a reasonable limit of extra effort, simply don‘t have time and/or motivation to do our (CS/IT) work: • - build, deploy, maintain e-Science-supporting platforms- integrate scientific applications into these platforms on a regular basis- and learn how to do all that in the first place Scientist  Computer Scientist

8. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer How did the Web succeed as a publishing medium?

9. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer Towards „Broad e-Science“ – what is missing? • For e-Science/Grid technology to achieve the role of the primary collaboration medium in „broad scientific computing“, it seems desirable to develop similar „platform survival characteristics“: • 1. Ease of use for passive users („consumers“) – Grid/Science portals / Desktops • 2. Ease of use for „producers“ (authors of services) - ? • 3. Collaboration support – at the core of the Grid / e-science movement • 4. Support for editorial processes - ? • 5. Infrastructure gets ubiquitous & commoditized – Industry interest

10. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer DLR VirtualLab: an e-Science precursor (1) • technology transfer project 2000-02 („50%“) • make scientific software accessible from every web browser (like scientific documents already are) • tap unexploited application potential • promote technology transfer as well as scientific exchange (internally, too!) • make better use of this part of DLR‘s scientifíc output

11. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer DLR VirtualLab: an e-Science precursor (2) • online at http://vl.nz.dlr.de • Pre-Grid (dedicated cluster) • Zope/Python,OpenPBS, mySQL, OpenLDAP, ... • a specialized ASP platform for an „interesting“ class of scientific software • IEEE CiSE, Feb. 2003 • project now continues as a DLR/Fraunhofer collaboration

12. I NTERNET I NTRANET Internal user External users Author Application Server Repository registeredexternal user Integrator ScientificPrograms Administrator Anonymousexternal user Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(1) • Care about the process • keep the barrier to entry low both for „consumers“ and for „producers“ • learn from publishing (traditional & web-based) • use staging !

13. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(2) Make life easy for consumers & producers - don‘t exclude important classes of users - „black-box“ integration: no internal modifications whatsoever - Provide „cheap“ UIs through generation - strive to re-use existing (G)UIs - Integration tools, perhaps web-based

14. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(2) Make life easy for consumers & producers - don‘t exclude important classes of users - „black-box“ integration: no internal modifications whatsoever - Provide „cheap“ UIs through generation - strive to re-use existing (G)UIs - Integration tools, perhaps web-based ID(na='Lambda', # Name pe='_NF and _Lambda_use',# precondition ty='FloatType', # type de='0.5', # default value ce='Lambda > 0.0', # constraint un='mu_m', # physical unit an='Input wavelength') # annotation

15. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(2) Make life easy for consumers & producers - don‘t exclude important classes of users - „black-box“ integration: no internal modifications whatsoever - Provide „cheap“ UIs through generation - strive to re-use existing (G)UIs - Integration tools, perhaps web-based

16. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(3) • Integrate human-readable information with executable (software) resources • online help and background info • (computational) „service search engines“ for managing the new e-Science „resource deluge“ • Structured metadata are good, but documentation can serve as a good fallback „fingerprint“

17. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer Conclusions • e-Science will likely evolve to broad/ubiquitous e-Science • support not only HPC users but the broader/general scientifc computing community • to help that process, make life easy for A widely deployed Grid-based e-science infrastructure is a publshing medium- support the process by content management, leveraging suitable technologies