Distributed Thinking

I’ve just attended a panel session on Cloud Computing in Newcastle, which gave several points of view on the uptake and applicability of Cloud. The discussion covered Sofware as a Service (e.g; SalesForce, EMailCloud), Platform as a Service (e.g. Google App Engine, Arjuna) and Infrastructure as a Service (e.g. Flexiscale, Amazon EC2). The optimistic view, taken by the majority of the panel, was that we are on a journey towards cloud computing becoming the norm for business computing. Duncan Mactear of 4Projects sounded a more cautious note; his company provides SaaS for the construction industry but does not use cloud; instead their servers are hosted in a third-party data centre. To which Tony Lucas of Flexiscale pointed out that 10 years ago, similar companies weren’t even using hosting services. Sarat Pedirela of Hedgehog Lab, an ISV, pointed out that the appropriate infrastructure will depend on the type of application. Currently, Hedgehog use cloud for non-critical application...

On October 14th, I will be hosting a Grid Computing Now! web seminar on the topic of Cloud Computing. We have lined up two very interesting speakers who are using Cloud now to make businesses work. Ross Cooney had a good technological solution to sell but couldn't make it economic until Cloud Computing allowed him to pay for his computation only when he needed it. He will discuss the instant benefits and long term impact of cloud computing to the development, competitiveness and scalability of your application. Alan Williamson created the BlueDragon Java CFML runtime engine that powers MySpace.com. He advises several businesses and will give an overview of the different types of services available and how to avoid being locked-in to a single supplier. You can register for this event here .

I've been asked to publicise the following event. The Technology Strategy Board has arranged an Information Day for Wednesday 22nd October to outline the various R & D Competitions being planned over the next 9 months. This Information Day will provide delegates with an opportunity to find out about the activities of the Technology Strategy Board and gain an understanding of the application process for Collaborative R&D Competitions as well as find out about other Technology Strategy Board activities. The event, being held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Central Birmingham, will open at 09:30 for a 10:00 start and will close at approximately 16:30; a full agenda will be available shortly. To register for this event please click on the following link and complete the on-line registration form For more information on the Technology Strategy Board please visit their web site

This is a reminder that 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. The deadline for entries has been extended to Friday October 17 . This extension is particularly intended to give more time to university staff and students who wish to enter. The initial proposal just requires 1,000 words describing the proposed solution. 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).

I was pleased by our workshop on research opportunities this week. Our speakers met several people who were interested in their work and might contribute to taking it further. It's hard to measure the outcomes of these events, because the collaborations that we are aiming to catalyse may take months to firm up and then may take much longer to produce actual results, but the first impressions are positive. Some of the networking happened outside the workshop itself, of course. That is the advantage of face-to-face meetings; sometimes all you need is to bring the right people together for the first few minutes. Also, you can follow serendipitous links, such as when a colleague pointed me at the workshop on declarative data centres that Microsoft Research Cambridge and HP Labs organised earlier this year. I think the UK is building a critical mass in data centre management and I hope this can be encouraged to the point where it becomes a viable industry. Beyond our workshop, ther...

This week will see the annual conference for UK e-Science , which for historical reasons is called the e-Science All-Hands Meeting. I have organised a knowledge transfer workshop for the Tuesday afternoon, with the aims of presenting research opportunities for e-Science in the UK commercial and public sectors. We have four excellent speakers lined up. Mark Ferrar is the Director of Infrastructure Architecture for NHS Connecting for Health in England. Mark is interested in opportunities for using the processing power available to the NHS to improve clinical outcomes, for example by running HPC models and diagnosis applications. Liam Newcombe is tackling the question of "Green IT" in data centres. This is a big topic in the industry, because energy prices are rising and carbon accounting is being deployed. Liam has developed an open-source integrated model of data centres for the BCS and the Carbon Trust. He is looking for collaborators to further improve this model. A...

I attended an interesting workshop this week. It was one of the series that Peter James has put together for his SusteIT project; this one focussed on desktop PCs. The talks and panels looked at measurement procurement of energy use, procurement options, desktop grids, power management and thin clients. In any sizeable organistion, Desktop PCs use a large amount of electricity and there are many options available for reducing this consumption - and saving money too. This is the second time that I've seen a British university do the sums and expect to save £250,000 a year. The panel on power management tools was interesting. These seem to be coming of age at last. Operating systems have had support for managing individual computers but a large organisation needs a system for managing thousands of PCs, with different policies for different groups, and of course the important facility to wake up in time for the distribution of updates. James Osborne gave an interesting analysi...

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is over for another year. Hundreds of performers have given thousands of shows to a huge number of culture seekers. Meanwhile, the IT industry has notched up another very public failure. The new box office system failed to cope with the demand for tickets on the first day and had to be patched hurriedly. It struggled along after that but was unable to implement the special offer that had been planned for last few days of the festival. It must be a challenge to cope with the huge interest on the first day of ticket sales and then to manage the varying load fot the next three months. For the other nine months of the year, of course, the system isn't needed at all. Does this sound like a candidate for cloud computing? I don't know how the existing system is implemented, but if it doesn't already use cloud to react to large swings in demand, perhaps the service providers should consider this option.

Yesterday saw a workshop on Sustainable IT at the new Queen Margaret University campus in Musselburgh. The workshop was ostensibly about "new ways of working" but another major focus was on how the adoption of thin clients allowed the architects to design an more environmentally friendly campus. Thin clients use less power on the desktop than PCs, which means less heat is generated in the classrooms, labs and open working areas. For QMU, this meant that the building can use natural cooling and ventilation, saving considerably more energy in addition to the saving from the terminals themselves. The switch to thin clients was also used to introduce the use of virtual desktops. These let staff and students access their work from anywhere on the campus and from home. Staff are encouraged to work from home when it suits them. On campus, staff now work in open plan areas rather than offices; overall, the extra freedom seems to outweigh any disadvantage from the change. The ...

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...