Distributed Thinking

We've been running our Green IT theme for several months and I'm pleased with the progress we've made. We've run two webinars and spoken at several events, including the ITU symposium on ICTs and Climate Change and Oxford University's conference on Low Carbon ICT As an example sector, we are working with the JISC-funded project on Sustainable IT in Higher Education- partly because this is a sector in which we can publicise progress without too many strings attached. We helped Peter James organise the first SusteIT workshop, which was held in Cardiff on June 19th. This has already caused quite a stir; Cardiff have done a good job of procuring an energy-efficient machine hall and other education establishments seem to be looking to this as an examplar. Later this year, we will be helping Peter with two more workshops that fall under our remit. Green IT has to consider all aspects of running an IT service. As such, it is a broader topic than we can cover. ...

Grid Computing Now! is running a competition to find uses of grid technology to reduce human impact on climate change. The competition is open to anyone who is 18 or over and resident in the UK. So get your thinking caps on and submit your best ideas! The topic is deliberately wide, as is the interpretation of "grid", to allow a wide scope for proposals. There will be three stages to the competition: an initial proposal of 1,000 words; an apprentice workshop, where finalists can speak to grid architects and academics to develop their ideas; and the final presentation at The British Computer Society on December 1st 2008. The deadline for registering your interest is July 31st, but the initial submission is not required until September 1st. See the competition web page for background information and details of how to enter. There are two tracks, one for IT professionals and the other for everyone else (including students).

A busy schedule and an unusually flakey wi-fi setup have conspired to limit my blogging activity from OGF23 this week. This is just a quick post to note a rather neat idea that was demonstrated by one part of the CoreGrid project. BOINC is the infrastructure used by volunteer computing projects such as SETI@home and ClimatePrediction.net . The system sends out jobs to be run on people's home computers and collects the result. Handling all this network traffic puts quite a load on the central server. What the CoreGrid demo has done is to combine BOINC with the BitTorrent peer-to-peer data distribution system, so that the load is distributed. This may not be news to some of you, as the paper was published last year. I like it; it's a simple idea to solve an immediate problem. I've heard of other projects looking at the potential of BitTorrent as well.

Alex Hardisty, of Cardiff University and the Healthcare@Home project, has noted his observations on HC2008 . In particular, he notes some trends which he plans to address in his research.

At HC2008 I was introduced to the XDS standard for Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (not to be confused with several other uses of the XDS acronym). XDS is a profile of the ebXML standards for registries and other related standards to specify a system for sharing medical documents. The important point is that XDS is supported by several major vendors and has been deployed in clinical health systems in several countries. As far as I'm aware, it has not made any impact in the grid world. The basic XDS standard can be extended to address particular use cases or to add functionality. One popular extension handles DICOM files (a format widely used in medical imaging). Another ( http://wiki.ihe.net/index.php?title=Cross_Community_Access">XCA ) supports federated registries, removing the single point of failure of the basic model. I think it is worth investigating for other e-Science applications. It may be simpler to leverage this work than to reinvent it. Also, it m...

GridToday reports that the Platform Global Conference will include a panel on whether HPC data centres can "go green". Among the strategies they will discuss include energy-directed scheduling, i.e. dynamically allocating workload to minimise electricity consumption. It so happens that I am organising a workshop at OGF23 on exactly this subject. We will be looking at the details of what is needed to make this a reality and what steps are needed to make this idea a reality.

Ian Foster notes a project at University of Notre Dame near Chicago which is distributing research computing facilities in order to provide heat to campus buildings. This is an interesting trade-off: on the one hand, the distribution of resources means that the waste heat is put to good use; on the other hand, it's possible that each distributed installation is less efficient that a good-quality centralised machine hall. This is another example of where we need good quality models and well-measured example deployments to help us decide which approaches give the best results.

This week, I attended Healthcare Computing 2008 to get an update on the current state of e-health in the UK and to explore how grid technology can contribute. Health Informatics is a broad subject and it isn't possible to engage with the whole field, but I see three main areas of potential engagement. The path is most followed by the academic community to date is that of linking together data used in clinical trials or in health research. This is a natural fit for the e-science community as it extends existing work on secure access to distributed research data. The medical world imposes more security constraints, which adds academic interest, but is otherwise familiar to the e-scientists. It is also of a scale that is manageable in research projects. Successful projects include Psygrid , which is now deployed across the NHS research centres in mental health and in bioinformatics. So this is the first area of engagement. A natural question is whether this experience with rese...

There has been some rather confused coverage in the press about the grid infrastructure that supports the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Times has an article that cast the grid as a "superfast internet", with the emphasis on the high-bandwidth links that have been laid to support the LHC data dispersal. It also talks about the numbers of servers connected to the LHC grid, but without clarifying the distinction between bandwidth and processing power. It also implies that the LHC grid is the only grid, which perhaps we can forgive the journalists for, as plenty of technical people still refer to "the grid" as if there were only one. A Yahoo article , taken from Sky News , goes rather further, claiming that "the internet, as we know it, could be obsolete within a decade". The phrase, "as we know it", lends a wonderful vagueness to the claim. The article goes on to say that the Grid was the brainchild of CERN, which of course is an exaggera...

Ian Foster pointed readers of his blog at a good article about CaBIG, the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid. This major project is led by the US National Cancer Institute and also involves Cancer Research Labs in the UK, with the aim to share data between cancer researchers. The UK's OGSA-DAI system is a major component of the deployed system. It's particularly interesting to note that the system includes support for clinical trials. Clinical trials are time-consuming and expensive, so many people want better systems for managing them and a number of grid projects are tackling this area. PsyGrid is one such project in the UK. They're not exactly blowing their own trumpet about this, but their system is being used as the studies and trials platform for the Mental Health Research Network, and has been selected by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) as the platform for providing electronic data collection services to support studies and trial across the ...

I am very pleased with the line-up for our webinar on May 7th. We will continue our investigation into best practice for running energy efficient data centres, following our successful webinar last October. This time we will have an emphasis on the impact of virtualisation and on how one can model and measure the effectiveness of proposed improvements. Nic Barnes will explain what Merrill Lynch observed when they applied virtualisation on the desktop and in the server room. They found that the benefits were in some cases partially offset by losses elswhere. Nic will demonstrate the importance of measuring real gains in practice. Liam Newcombe will describe the work of the BCS in developing a model for predicting data centre efficiency. This approach will allow managers to plan and evaluate designs in advance of their implementation. Liam will show that the choice of metrics requires careful analysis. As always, viewers will be encouraged to ask questions. Any that we can...

Virtualisation has obvious benefits for much commercial IT, where existing servers often have utilisation rates of 10% or less. It's less clear whether virtualisation is so useful for High-Performance Computing (HPC), where systems are often kept running at utilisation rates above 90%. Nevertheless, there are potential benefits from adopting some aspects of virtualisation in these environments. The question is, do the benefits outweigh the cost in performance? This was the topic of yesterday's workshop on System Level Virtualisation for HPC (which was part of EuroSys 2008 ). The workshop was rather small but I did learn quite a bit. A couple of talks investigated the performance hits of using virtualised OS's instead of addressing the hardware directly. This varied, depending on the type of application; if IO was minimal, the slowdown was minimal too. An "average" slowdown seemed to be on the order of 8%. Samuel Thibault of Xensource looked at ways of usin...

Licensing has been an ongoing issue for virtualising and grid-enabling applications. Many licensing models do not transfer easily to a world where applications and virtual servers can be run on many processors and moved from machine to machine. Vendors want to ensure that they are paid for the full use of their applications, while IT managers want to know how much they can expect to pay in a given accounting period. Everyone is aware of the problem and several people have been trying to work out ways forward, but the issue is still unresolved. Grid Computing Now! are bringing together some of the key players in the industry for a webinar on Thursday 10 April at 14:00 GMT: David Gittins of Capgemini, who has been working with the public sector on this challenge Neil Sanderson, Product Manager for Virtualisation at Microsoft Mark Cresswell of Scalable Solutions, a leader in the provision of tools for monitoring and reporting usage. Ian Osborne, Project Director of Grid Computin...

Yesterday I attended the Low Carbon ICT Conference organised by Oxford University, with funding from JISC. This was a good an useful day, with speakers covering a range of topics, and a small number of exhibits. Some of the speakers were familiar - Zafar Chaudry gave his excellent talk on the benefits of virtualisation in one of our webinars , while Liam Newcombe will be speaking in our next-but-one webinar on May 7th. Others were new to me. The speakers' talks covered office ITC equipment, virtualisation, data centres, PC manufacturing, sustainability entrepreneurship and enterprise planning. I was more at home with the techie end of things, but this is not a problem that can be tackled by technology alone so it was good to see the broad participation of this conference. I was aware of most of the technical issues, although I was surprised at how much energy is used by desktop PCs and peripherals (see below). I was also interested to hear Juergen Heidegger recommend the use ...

"This is the Century of Information" - G. Brown, November 2007. This week, I attended a think-a-thon about a strategy document that the e-Science community in the UK is developing. The goal is to put in place the right mechanisms for ensuring that UK research can make the most of new computing technologies and methods. We have many success stories from the e-science programme; the question is, how do we build on those successes and make the techniques available to everyone? One point that arose from the workshop is that we need different types of successes. Most of the examples put forward were of good research enabled in a range of domains (GeoSciences, BioScience, Chemistry, Physics, Social Science, etc.). We also found examples of advances in Computer Science itself, rather than just using CS to support other fields; this is essential if we are to engage CS academics. Beyond academia, we need examples of knowledge transfer to industry. This is where the Grid Computi...

With the twin growth of supercomputing demand on the one hand and energy cost on the other, it makes sense for companies to produce supercomputers that use less power. IBM started the trend with the Blue Gene series, of course, although that project was nore about building the fastest computer while keeping energy consumption somewhat reasonable. More recently, others have joined the fold. One such is SiCortex , who claim to have designed their systems from the chip level up to minimise power consumption. Their SC5832 machine offers 5832 1GFlops 64-bit processors for 20kW, while for the SC648 they claim half a teraflop powered from a standard wall socket. That's not the only approach, of course. Floating-point accelerator boards and Graphics Processing Units are being used to boost computing power for specific applications while keeping costs low. The Register has a good overview article from November's SuperComputing conference. Meanwhile, in a talk at the Mardi Gras C...

This blog posting is an oddity - Bill St. Arnaud suggests a micropayment scheme whereby consumers pay for broadband services by increasing the cost of their household electricity (or car mileage) for a certain duration. The utility companies then pay this amount to the broadband service provider. So the service provider gets income from a source other than advertising; the consumer gets reasonably priced product, and the consumer reduces their energy usage because the price has gone up for that period. I don't see it happening, myself, but it's an interesting piece of lateral thinking.

In order to expand our "community of practice" on energy-efficient data centres, we have visited several people or groups who have an interest in the topic. Just over a week ago, some NeSC colleagues and I visited BRE's Scottish office . BRE used to be known as the Buildings Research Establishment and the folk at their East Kilbride office are particularly interested in sustainable development. So far they've been mainly working with housing and small businesses, but they seem potentially interested in modelling larger establishments. They are also interested in multi-level modelling of heat flow within buildings; something our e-science connections could definitely help with. We also had a good conversation about DC power circuits. This week, I was invited to speak at a meeting of the Russell University Group IT directors ( RUGIT ) - i.e. the people responsible for ICT at many of our leading universities. I presented some of the outcomes from the HTC week in N...

This week, the e-Science Institute launched a new research theme which should be of great relevance to industry as well as scientists - in fact, it may even help ordinary consumers to protect our own privacy online. The theme is about "Trust and Security in Virtual Communities". Andrew Martin , the theme leader, explained its aim in a webcast talk . The problem that Andrew is exploring is how we can trust a grid infrastructure to protect our sensitive data. In addition, how can we trust the results that we get back from running a job on "the computing cloud"? To give one concrete example, Andrew was involved in the climateprediction.net project, which encouraged people to contributed their PC's spare cycles to run climate modelling simulations. This raised several security issues. From the users' point of view, could they trust that the climateprediction.net program would not hijack their PC? Conversely, could the scientists trust that the data sets r...

I'm very pleased to say that our Knowledge Transfer Network, Grid Computing Now! , will continue to operate for at least another year. We have just received final confirmation from the newly-reconstituted Technology Strategy Board . This is welcome news; it means that we can continue our plans to bring users, vendors and academics together to address real problems in several sectors. So it seems a good moment to reflect on the state of KTNs and how they might develop. Innovate07 was the showcase for all 22 Knowledge Transfer Networks. This was my first time at Innovate and I was impressed by the range of technologu areas and delegates. It was also a good opportunity for networking between KTNs, which has led to some joint initiatives. This range of KTNs is in part a branding exercise, as some KTNs had previous existences as Faraday Institutes or other institutes. So we at GCN are in the odd position of being one of the first KTNs to be set up and at the same time among the o...