RSC-SW-meeting-2July03

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Introducing Research Grids and e-Science whats
in it for the Humanities?
Dr Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN DRH2003 Universi
ty of Gloucestershire
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Overview

• Setting the context - a little bit of history
• The UK e-Science Programme
• Research some common challenges
• Whats happening now?
• Opportunities..

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Grid computing refers to the large-scale
integration of computer systems via high speed
networks to provide on-demand access to
data-crunching capabilities and functions not
available to one individual or group of
machinesIan Foster, Scientific American April
2003
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Grid technology enables large-scale scientific
and business collaboration among members of
virtual organizations, remote experimentation and
high-performance distributed computing and data
analysisIan Foster, Scientific American April
2003
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The Grid 1967 2003 Part 1 With
acknowledgement to Rob Baxter (NeSC)

• 1967 Worlds first packet-switched network
• 1973 Ethernet demo at Xerox PARC
• 1976 First Cray-1 super-computer
• 1984 JANet built
• 1988 Condor project begins earliest cycle
  scavenger or scheduler ideal tool for Grid??
• 1991 WWW created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
• 1993 Legion project launch used Grid Object
  model
• 1994 Nimrod project launch co-ordinates tasks
  across a network
• 1997 UNICORE project starts combined toolkit
  and portal model
• 1997 Storage Resource Broker v1.0 client
  server middleware connecting to heterogeneous
  datasets based on attributes
• 1998 The GRID book Foster Kesselman

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The Grid 1967 2003 Part 2

• 1998 Globus v1.0.0 the leading Grid toolkit
• Defines standards for security, resource
  discovery, data access transfer, remote job
  execution
• Layered architecture
• Single sign-on
• 2001 March Global Grid Forum 1
• 2001 March Web Services IBM provided a
  sea-change in Grid thinking
• 2001 July UK e-Science Programme Phase 1 launch
• 2001 November GEANT activated pan-European
  gigabit network
• 2002 February OGSADAI (Open Grid Services
  Architecture-Data Access Integration) project
  launched UK Grid Core Programme with DTI, IBM,
  Oracle partners, a marriage of Globus and Web
  Services
• 2003 March Open Grid Services Infrastructure OGSI
  V1.0 spec
• 2003 July UK e-Science Programme Phase 2 planning
• 2003 September 2nd All Hands meeting in
  Nottingham tomorrow.

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UK e-Science Programme

• e-Science is about global collaboration in key
  areas of science and the next generation of
  infrastructure that will enable it.
• Dr John Taylor, Director General of the Research
  Councils

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UK e-Science Programme Phase 1 2001 - 2004

• Professor Tony Hey, Director
• Government funds from OST and DTI industry
  matching
• 74M application projects
• 35M Core Programme (CP)
• CP managed by EPSRC for Research Councils
• To advance the development of robust and generic
  Grid middleware in collaboration with industry
• http//www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/

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UK e-Science Grid Centres of Excellence With
acknowledgement to Tony Hey
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Newcastle
DL
LancasterSocial Sciences
White Rose
Belfast
Manchester
Birmingham/Warwick Modelling
Oxford
Cambridge
Cardiff
UCL
RL
Hinxton
London
BristolMedia
Soton
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Powering the Virtual Universehttp//www.astrog
rid.ac.uk(Edinburgh, Belfast, Cambridge,
Leicester, London, Manchester, RAL)
Picture credits NASA / Chandra X-ray
Observatory / Herman Marshall (MIT),
NASA/HST/Eric Perlman (UMBC), Gemini
Observatory/OSCIR, VLA/NSF/Eric Perlman
(UMBC)/Fang Zhou, Biretta (STScI)/F Owen (NRA)
Multi-wavelength showing the jet in M87 from top
to bottom Chandra X-ray, HST optical, Gemini
mid-IR, VLA radio. AstroGrid will provide
advanced, Grid based, federation and data mining
tools to facilitate better and faster scientific
output.



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myGrid Project

• Imminent deluge of data
• Highly heterogeneous
• Highly complex and inter-related
• Convergence of data and literature archives
• Virtual workbench

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Comb-e-Chem Project
Video
Simulation
Properties
Analysis
StructuresDatabase
Diffractometer
X-Raye-Lab
Propertiese-Lab
Grid Middleware
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What are the common challenges?

• Research is increasingly dataintensive
• New approaches require new skills
  (ITstatisticsdomain)
• Inter-disciplinary e.g. Astro-informatics
• Collaborative virtual communities
• Knowledge-rich infrastructures development of
  ontologies, terminology servers
• Highly distributed resource utilisation
  instruments, bibliographic collections, primary
  data

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Resources are used in new ways

• Spatial change
• Federation, aggregation, dis-aggregation,
  replication, manipulation, linking, annotation,
  editing/versioning, transformation
• Knowledge extraction
• Analysis (textual, musical, statistical,
  mathematical, visual, chemical, gene)
• Mining (text, data, structures)
• Modelling (economic, mathematical, biological..)
• Presentation (visualisation, rendering.)

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What is happening now?

• Planning for Core Programme 2 2003-2006
• Digital libraries and e-Science
• Joint UKOLN / NeSC workshops
• Digital Curation Centre call
• EPSRC/JISC funded projects such as eBank (with
  Combechem) see Ariadne article http//www.ariadne.
  ac.uk/issue36/lyon/
• National Centre for Text Mining call
• e-Social Science
• Centre of Excellence Lancaster ESRC April 2004
• Awareness Training Environment JISC August 2003
• Humanities ???

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Some possible applications in the humantities?

• Complex text mining across distributed documents
  multi-lingual processing??
• Visualisation and modelling of historically
  linked archaeological sites
• Real-time retrieval and image analysis of
  multiple video streams news and media??
• New distributed and collaborative performance
  scenarios
• ?????

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Opportunities for collaboration.