GRID%20technologies%20for%20learning

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GRID technologies for learning
OnLine Educa BerlinDecember 3-5 2003 Future
Technology for Learning session

• Pierluigi Ritrovato
• Centro di Ricerca in Matematica Pura ed Applicata

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Outline

• What is the GRID
• The GRID history
• What is available
• GRID vs Web
• Why grid for Learning
• Some relevant projects

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What are The Grid

• The grid is an emerging infrastructure that will
  fundamentally change the way we think about - and
  use - computing. The grid will connect multiple
  regional and national computational grids to
  create a universal source of computing
  power.The Grid Blueprint for a New Computing
  Infrastructure, Foster and Kesselman, Morgan
  Kaufmann Publishers, 1999

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The Current GRID Vision

• Grid has emerged as an important new field,
  distinguished from conventional distributed
  computing by its focus on large-scale resource
  sharing, innovative applications, and, in some
  cases, high-performance orientation for problem
  solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual
  organizations
• Source Foster I., Kesselman C., Tuecke S.
• The Anatomy of the Grid Enabling Scalable
  Virtual Organizations
• January 2001

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Outline

• What are the GRID
• The GRID history
• What is available
• GRID vs Web
• Why grid for Learning
• Some relevant projects

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Where the Grid is coming from

• Work over the last decade on several distinct
  topics
• Metacomputing - combining distributed
  heterogeneous computing resources for solving a
  single problem
• Data Archiving - building collections of data on
  specific topics with open metadata catalogues and
  well-documented data formats
• Collaborative Working - network-based facilities
  for distributed, concurrent working on shared
  information
• Data visualization - large-scale immersive
  facilities for 3D visual interaction with data
  coupled to computational analysis
• Instrumentation control - remote control of
  experimental equipment and real time data
  gathering systems

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Who are using the Grid?

• Physicists
• Large Hadron Collider Data Grid
• Engineers
• real-time visualisation, rapid turn-round
  simulation evaluation
• Astrophysicists
• searching across many instrument-specific data
  archives to study a new class of object at all
  wavelengths
• Environmentalists
• climate change, pollution
• Biologists
• Genome research, drugs design
• . . .

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Outline

• What are the GRID
• The GRID history
• What is available
• GRID vs Web
• Why grid for Learning
• Some relevant projects

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The current state

• 1st Generation
• " involved local "Metacomputers" with basic
  services such as distributed file systems and
  site-wide single sign on, upon which adventurous
  software developers created distributed
  applications with custom communications
  protocols.
• 2nd Generation
• began with projects such Condor, I-WAY (the
  origin of Globus), Legion (origin of Avaki) and
  UNICOR (from EU), 2G Grids offered basic building
  blocks, but deployment involved significant
  customization making interoperability
  problematic, and interoperability among 2G Grid
  systems is very difficult.
• 3rd Generation
• The GGF community is taking lessons learned from
  1G and 2G Grids and from web services
  technologies and concepts to create 3G
  architectures like the Open Grid Services
  Architecture (OGSA) whereby a set of common
  interface specifications supports the
  interoperability of discrete, independently
  developed services.

Source GridToday October 27/2003 Vol 2 n.43 THE
RISE OF THIRD-GENERATION GRIDSBy Charlie
Catlett, Global Grid Forum Chairman
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OGSAthe Open Grid Services Architecture

• Service orientation to virtualize resources
• Define fundamental Grid service behaviors
• A unifying framework for interoperability
  establishment of total system properties
• Service description and discovery
• Service lifetime management
• Authentication, authorization, policy
• Notification
• Integration with Web services
• Leverage on commercial base standards
• Neutral wrt the hosting environment technologies
  and developing languages

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Grids and Industry Early Examples
Entropia Distributed computing
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Europe vs USA
Europe hones an edge in technologyContinent
leads U.S. in linking PC 'grids'By John Markoff
and Jennifer L. Schenker/NYT (The New York
Time)Tuesday, November 11, 2003 Novartis
used American software technology to harness the
power of its office PC's, but European and
American scientists and government officials said
Europe was moving faster than the United States
to capitalize on the approach, which is called
grid computing.
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EU funded projects in 5FP
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Outline

• What are the GRID
• The GRID history
• What is available
• GRID vs Web
• Why grid for Learning
• Some relevant projects

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GRID vs WEB

• Dynamic
• General resources sharing
• Scientific target
• Architecture oriented
• Aiming at standardising the behaviour
• Focused on interoperability, reliability and
  security
• Based on web standards

• Static
• Data sharing
• Business and masses target
• Infrastructure oriented
• Aiming at standardising the communication
  (protocols)
• Focused on sharing and collecting information
• ?

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For More Information

• GRIDSTART
• www.gridstart.org
• Global Grid Forum
• www.ggf.org
• GRID Today
• www.gridtoday.com

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Outline

• What are the GRID
• The GRID history
• What is available
• GRID vs Web
• Why grid for Learning
• Some relevant projects

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Motivationlacks of existing (e)Learning
practices and environments

• based on the information transfer paradigm with
  focus on the content and the teacher
• find the best way for presenting content in order
  to transmit information to learners
• Technology driven approach
• Missing specific didactical models
• all the students are considered the same
• finds its perfect technical mirror in the page
  oriented approach to the Web
• e-Learning becomes an activity in which teachers
  produce, and students consume, multimedia books
  on the Web

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MotivationThe Learning Paradigm Shift

• knowledge construction, rather than information
  transfer
• focus is on the learner and on the learning
  strategies
• Based on new forms of learning
• Experiential and contextualised - the
  understanding of concepts through direct
  experience of their manifestation in realistic
  contexts
• Learning as a social process active
  collaboration with other students, teachers,
  tutors, experts or, in general, available human
  peers
• Personalised learning - guarantee the learner
  will reach a cognitive excellence through
  different learning paths tailored on learners
  characteristics and preferences

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Some characteristics of future learning scenarios

• Service Orientation
• Dynamism, dynamism, dynamism
• High demand of interoperability
• Open Architecture
• Security and Trust
• Multi institutional account and billing protocols

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Why GRID technologies

• Are demonstrating their effectiveness for
  implementing e-Science infrastructure for sharing
  data, applications and knowledge
• Allow the virtualisation and sharing of several
  kind of resources facilitating the dynamic
  context generation
• Facilitate the realisation of ubiquitous
  computing concept
• Facilitate the realisation of emerging
  challenging learning scenarios through dynamic VO

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Outline

• What are the GRID
• The GRID history
• What is available
• GRID vs Web
• Why grid for Learning
• Some relevant projects

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www.momanet.it/iwt

• Intelligent Web Teacher is an extensible
  application framework for building learning
  solutions
• It has been designed for facilitating the
  paradigm shift

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GRASPGRID based Application Service
Provisionwww.eu-grasp.net
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www.lege-wg.org/Activity/Home
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ELeGIEuropean Learning GRID Infrastructure

• FP6 Integrated Project under negotiation
• 23 partners from 8 EU Countries
• 4 years
• 5 test-beds

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Ritrovato Pierluigi ritrovato_at_crmpa.unisa.it
CRMPA University of Salerno 39 089 964289/2201
Useful Links ELeGI coming soon! IWT
www.momanet.it/iwt LeGE-WG - www.lege-wg.org/Activ
ity/Home GRASP www.eu-grasp.org GRIDSTART -
www.gridstart.org Global Grid Forum -
www.ggf.org GRID Today - www.gridtoday.com
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Some future learning scenariosField trip
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future learning environment architecture
Learning GRID Applications (Virtual Campus,
Virtual Scientific Experiments, personalized
mobile learning, )
OGSA generic services (orchestration, data mngt.,
logging, )
OGSA Domain Specific Services (user profiling,
skill assessment, LO mngt, ontology mngt, )
Web services run time engine
Operating Systems
Physical resources