Distributed Thinking

Our next webinar will look at a technology that is only just beginning to be deployed in industrial applications. The Semantic Web allows meanings to be attached to data and text and users to look for content by querying these annotations. At its simplest this should mean no more scrolling through pages of search results. More sophisticated uses include enabling service-oriented markets and automating aspects of data integration. This seminar, which will take place on Thursday May 24th, will describe the principles of the semantic web and show how it can already be applied to real industry use cases. John Davies of BT will give a brief introduction to Semantic Web technology and show how it can be applied in industry, focussing on four application areas: knowledge management, information integration, service-oriented environments and applications in the health sector. Paul Walsh of Segala will show how semantic Content Labels improve trust when browsing, by letting users discover whic...

So that was OGF20 and the 2nd EGEE User Forum. I was so busy there that I didn't have time or energy to blog. So much happened in such a short time that I'd have been hard put to keep up. This turned out to be the best-attended GGF/OGF meeting ever, narrowly beating GGF5 (which was held in Edinburgh in 2002). We had over 900 people attend during the course of the week and a significant number stayed for all or most of the week. I haven't had feedback from all the sessions but I believe the workshops were well attended and I know the Grids Mean Business and the EGEE-specific sessions went very well. A notable aspect of the week was the good interaction between the different communities. In particular, the colocation of the OGF and EGEE events has helped to show both sides where standards can apply or are needed. The commercial delegates helped to guide the requirements for standardisation work as well as sharing information on best practice. The exhibition space had ...

It's the end of the first day of Grids Mean Business , the industry track that we've organised at the joint meeting of OGF20 and The EGEE User Forum. I'm too tired to write a detailed report but I'm very happy with today's sessions. We've had some great talks and really interesting discussions. Here's hoping that tomorrow is just as successful.

Next Tuesday, April 24th, the BBC will be showing an episode of Horizon all about the FireGrid project. The vision behind FireGrid is that we can use the grid and HPC computing to model the spread of fire in buildings, to improve building design, firefighters' training and actual response in emergencies. This is one of a number of grid projects looking at the use of real-time modelling to improve emergency response. Others are focussing on floods, earthquakes or the release of noxious substances into the atmosphere. In each case, the idea is to use lots of sensors to provide input to complex HPC models, which in turn provide forecasts to an emergency response control room. There are many technical issues that need to be solved before such systems can be deployed live. We don't yet know the best way to guide simulations as new sensor input becomes available. We need better ways of allocating priority jobs to grid resources - it's clear that a traditional queue system wo...

On Thursday (April 19th) I will be hosting another in our series of webinars. This week's seminar will feature case studies of two core technologies for building a cutting-edge infrastructure. Zafar Chaudry will describe how he used virtualisation to consolidate his disparate servers and storage provision into a manageable and scalable infrastructure. Then Mark Simpson will show how he deployed a service-oriented architecture to give a major financial institution far more control and scalability over its business processes. Zafar and Mark come from very different sectors. Zafar is at the Liverpool Women's Hospital while Mark works for the business IT consultants Griffiths-Waite. I find it fascinating to see just how broad is the uptake of these new techniques - they really seem to be applicable across most sectors. This will be one issue that I'll explore in the discussion on Thursday. I'll also ask Mark and Zafar to comment on how virtualisation and SOA interact in m...

Much of the reason that I haven't blogged much recently is that I've been up to my eyes in organising OGF20 (colocated with the EGEE User Forum) and in particular the Grids Mean Business industry track. With just over a month to go, I'm pleased to report that we have well over 500 delegates registered and the programme of speakers is rather good. In addition, we have a range of workshops which will look at new developments in Grid middleware and operations. Our two keynote speakers for OGF20 will be Tony Hey and Peter Coveney . Tony is VP of technical computing at Microsoft and will be giving us a new talk on the Social Grid. Peter is professor of computational chemistry at University College London and has stretched the use of Grid infrastructures to perform massive simulations of chemical processes. Both are excellent speakers and will give fascinating talks. In addition, Mark Linesch and Bob Jones will introduce the activities of OGF and EGEE respectively, while ...

Last week I hosted a webinar on distributed systems in e-health. The speakers were Derek Hill, CEO of Ixico, and Michael Rigby, Professor of Health Information Strategy at Keele University. Derek launched Ixico three years ago as a spin-off of the UK e-Science Programme and now it is selling services internationally. Michael's project is still in the research stages but in my opinion it shows a more robust approach to managing health records than the current approach being implemented by the English National Health Service. Take a look and see what you think - follow the links at http://grid.globalwatchonline.com/epicentric_portal/site/GRID/menuitem.c4f9e41660ec9e9b08a38510eb3e8a0c/ .

The heat produced by modern CPUs means that chip designers can no longer crank up the clock speed. But they can fit more processing cores on a chip. 2-core and 4-core x86 chips are already standard; Sun's SPARC chips have 8 or 16 cores, and Intel recently announced an 80-core prototype. To get the best performance out of multi-core chips, especially once you get beyond 2 or 4 cores, you either have to write applications to make best use of those cores or write compilers and dynamic optimising systems that automatically transform your code to get that performance. The problem is, most programmers aren't very good at this and most of the tools they use aren't brilliant either. I think this has immediate policy implications. CS departments should immediately, if they haven't already done so, make the teaching of parallel and distributed programming a required component of their undergraduate courses. Companies and professional bodies should encourage their staff to re...

Much of the reason I haven't blogged here more frequently is that I am programme chair of OGF20 and this is taking much of my time. So I'm pleased to report that registration for OGF20 is now open. Here is the official announcement. Note that early registration rates are available until March 15th. Some aspects of the programme have been confirmed; others are still being finalised. I'll post news here over the next few weeks. Registration is now open for OGF20 and the EGEE 2nd User Forum being held May 7-11 in Manchester, UK. Register on-line by visiting http://www.ogf.org/OGF20/events_regstrtn_ogf20.php This event will feature: • Keynote and Plenary presentations by leading grid luminaries • Chartered Group Sessions including Standards Working Group Sessions and BoFs • Enterprise Track including Requirements Alignment, Best Practices and Adoption Sessions • e-Science Track featuring Community Workshops • ‘Grids Means Business’ Industry Program showcasing business sol...

Tomorrow (Thursday) I'll be hosting the next web seminar run by Grid Computing Now! , at 2:30pm UK time. We'll be looking at how grid technologies can help businesses collaborate on joint projects. Mike Boniface of IT Innovation will explain how the SIMDAT project has enabled pharmaceutical and automotive companies to collaborate on product design. Tom Jackson of York University will describe how the BROADEN project is enabling Rolls-Royce to monitor after-sales performance. Both projects use grid to manage distributed data and computer assets belonging to multiple organisations. The presentations will show how this leads to real business benefits. You can join the seminar at http://mediazone.brighttalk.com/event/gridcomputingnow/a4f23670e1-260-intro .

I'm just back from OGF19 , which was very productive in a number of ways. One strand of interest is the continuing dialogue between the storage industry (represented by SNIA ) and the grid world. This conversation has been developing slowly over the last year. I was on a panel at MSST 2006 that explored some aspects of this. SNIA were also present at GGF18 to explore where the two concerns meet. Both sides are still learning about each other, as they are both complex and changing technologies. One obvious area of overlap is that of data replication. Many grid projects maintain replicas of data, to improve access times and/or to guard against loss. The classic example is the LHC Grid, but there are many other examples, particularly in the world of data librarines. Meanwhile, the storage industry supply replication systems for commerical data, specialising in backups and disaster recovery. The two technologies work at different levels. Storage systems copy data from one di...

ClimatePrediction.net will feature on the BBC again this Sunday, in a television programme fronted by Sir David Attenborough. " Climate Change: Britain Under Threat " will broadcast the results of a BBC-sponsored experiment using ClimatePredication.net with a focus on how climate change is and will affect the UK. The results will appear on the BBC Climate Change website after thebroadcast (and will also hopefully be in a Nature paper in a little while, pending peer review!)

Last night Heather Kreger gave an overview of the Service Modeling Language (SML) to members of the OGF's OGSA working group. The high-level view that I took away from this is that SML is a modelling effort based purely on XML (particularly XML Schema ), rather than initiatives that map CIM or UML into XML. The advantage of this is that it has a cleaner rendering; for example, it doesn't have to translate the CIM or UML use of inheritance (which XML Schema doesn't directly support). In practice, models can be rather large. SML also uses Schematron to enable models to be split across multiple documents, while still enabling validation against the models. A related activity, CML, is producing some core models in SML. SML is backed by BEA, BMC, CA, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun, so certainly has industry support. They intend to submit the specification to a standards body in a few months time, although it will be a while after that before it is pu...

This seven minute report is mostly about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but any discussion of the LHC must mention the Grid. From our point of view, the novelty is not the technology - that's what we do - but seeing it explained on the national news.

I'm very pleased to report that OGF20 will be held in the UK: to be precise, at the Manchester International Convention Centre from May 7-11 next year. It will be co-located with the 2nd EGEE User Forum. Grid Computing Now! are organising a two-day industry outreach track . This is something I've been working on for almost a year. At first my main interest was to get the event in the UK and run the GCN! part of the programme. This got me involved in choosing the venue and general planning; I am now programme chair of the whole shebang and devoting quite a bit of time to planning the sessions. We have just announced a Call For Proposals for presentations, panels and workshops. This call covers all aspects of industry and academic use of Grids, including the GCN! track. Full details are available on the OGF web site . I would encourage everyone to submit suggestions; the deadline for submission is February 9th. Obviously I'd be happy to discuss this with anyone who is inte...

Power consumption is already on the minds of IT managers , having replaced space as the main (non-staff) cost of running IT centres. The recent publication of the Stern report on the economic effects of climate change [ full report ; BBC online coverage ] gives extra incentive to look at ways of reducing power use. Virtualisation and Grid seem obvious tools to investigate for this end. Case studies have shown they can more than double the utilisation rates of existing servers. The Grid Computing Now! team are looking into this approach and we're keen to hear your stories. Please get in touch if you have experience of increasing server utilisation - or if you need to control your power bills!

Last week we recorded and broadcast another Grid Computing Now! webinar. This featured Steve Wallage of The 451 Group and Shahid Mohammed of Marsh talking about the business case for Grid. Steve presented a distillation of the 451 Group's findings from talking to Grid users across a wide range of sectors. Shahid then gave us the benefit of his experience applying Grid in an e-commerce business. Both are good presenters and I recommend their talks. You can see the webinar at http://brighttalk.com/comm/gridcomputingnow/3b03d97eee-2473-632-2319 . This uses Flash and so should be compatible with most browsers. Viewers submitted a good range of questions. A couple of people asked about the type of businesses - small, medium or large; finance, pharma or other - that can benefit from Grid. Shahid's talk demonstrated that reasonably small firms in a general commercial sector can benefit. Another question focussed on security. Both Steve and Shahid explained that Grid can be ...

I've already mentioned last week's workshop on Virtual Organisations and Grids . You can now read my review of the event on the Grid Computing Now! web site.

I am gratified to see that GRIDtoday's summary of SC06 gave prominence to two UK projects - the social science simulation of population trends and the Grid monitor based on Google Earth . (I've mentioned both of these on this blog). The UK e-Science stand was only one of many in a large exhibition, so it's good to see that we made an impression.

We just held an interesting and I think successful workshop on Virtual Organisations and Grids , in which we looked at the limitations of the current state of the art and what is needed to support industrial requirements. A short summary is in the works and will appear on the Grid Computing Now! web site in a couple of days, with a longer report to follow in due course. What I want to raise here is a more speculative notion that arose during the discussions - what would be the Web 2.0 implementation of a Virtual Organisation (VO)? Could users easily create their own VO, invite their colleagues to join, actually manage distributed access in a distributed fashion, etc.? Obviously, being Web 2.0, the legal and contractual issues would have to be minimal, so this would apply more to open-source projects. The nearest model I can think of is more the SourceForge approach, in which anyone can create a project and invite others to join. The SourceForge (or equivalent) software provides cor...