1. Grid Content Evolution & Management Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing

2. Grid Content Evolution & Management: Enabling e-Science for the Rest of Us Thilo Ernst Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology (Thilo.Ernst@first.fhg.de) Jochen Wauer DLR Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing

3. Seite 3 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing Scientific Software Just A Mouse Click Away (1) A 1968 vision:... Back to our hypothetical user. He seats himself at his console [...]. He dials his local computer and 'logs in' by presenting his name, problem number, and password to the monitor program. He calls for either a public program, one of his own programs, or a colleague's program that he has permission to use. The monitor links him to it, and he then communicates with that program... - J.C.R. Licklider, "The Computer as a Communication Device" (Director, ARPA-Information Processing Techniques Office)  Did he just mean telnet? Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

4. Seite 4 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing e-Science – a contemporary Definition „e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.“ „large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation“ „The Grid is an architecture proposed to bring all these issues together and make a reality of such a vision for e-Science“ „e-Science will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken“ (*) (Source: UK Research Council e-Science Core Programme) Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

5. Seite 5 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing The entire story? Grid computing / e-Science still focus on high-demand, large-scale applications Evolution: high performance computing  Grid computing  e-Science renders an emphasis on such applications understandable But when mature Grid & e-Science technologies are available they will likely be attractive to, a wealth of smaller (and computationally less demanding) research efforts - e-Science will become ubiquitous (*) But for this to happen, these technologies must develop additional characteristics unrelated to the original HPC focus of the Grid movement Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

6. Seite 6 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing Scientific Software Just A Mouse Click Away (2) 2003: Are we there? Internet & WWW are ubiquitious and have revolutionized the exchange of scientific information But progress w.r.t. scientific software lacks behind when compared with the ease of accessing scientific documents today „Reuse by download“: requires installation or even porting – limiting factor for broad exchange Distributed computing technologies exist (remote shells, CORBA, Java- RMI, Web Services) but there is no reliable, ubiquitous infrastructure to which Licklider‘s request could be addressed. Answer: No. Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

7. Seite 7 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing Scientific Software Just A Mouse Click Away (3)... New question: Why? in much of real life science (non-Computer) Scientists, beyound a reasonable limit of extra effort, simply don‘t have time and/or motivation to do our (CS/IT) work: - build, deploy, maintain e-Science-supporting platforms - integrate scientific applications into these platforms on a regular basis - and learn how to do all that in the first place Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer Scientist  Computer Scientist

8. Seite 8 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing How did the Web succeed as a publishing medium? Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer CharacteristicsEnabling factors, ~timeEvolutionary advantage 1. easy to use in read-mode for almost everybody Browsers ~ 1993 Search engines ~1994 more „consumers“ 2. easy to write without web developer background LaTex2HTML, MS-Office web integration ~1996 more „producers“ 3. collaboration/community support (Cross-site links ~1990) community portals ~1999 Mutual reinforcement community / medium 4. support for traditional editorial processes content management systems ~1999 organize content growth, integrate with print media 5. infrastructure ubiquitous, commoditized, reliable ISPs/hosters become an industry (~1998) Specialization / division of work

9. Seite 9 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing Towards „Broad e-Science“ – what is missing? For e-Science/Grid technology to achieve the role of the primary collaboration medium in „broad scientific computing“, it seems desirable to develop similar „platform survival characteristics“: 1. Ease of use for passive users („consumers“) – Grid/Science portals / Desktops 2. Ease of use for „producers“ (authors of services) - ? 3. Collaboration support – at the core of the Grid / e-science movement 4. Support for editorial processes - ? 5. Infrastructure gets ubiquitous & commoditized – Industry interest Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

10. Seite 10 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing DLR VirtualLab: an e-Science precursor (1) - technology transfer project 2000-02 („50%“) - make scientific software accessible from every web browser (like scientific documents already are) - tap unexploited application potential - promote technology transfer as well as scientific exchange (internally, too!) - make better use of this part of DLR‘s scientifíc output Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

11. Seite 11 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing DLR VirtualLab: an e-Science precursor (2) - online at http://vl.nz.dlr.de - Pre-Grid (dedicated cluster) - Zope/Python,OpenPBS, mySQL, OpenLDAP,... - a specialized ASP platform for an „interesting“ class of scientific software - IEEE CiSE, Feb. 2003 - project now continues as a DLR/Fraunhofer collaboration Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

12. Seite 12 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(1) Care about the process - keep the barrier to entry low both for „consumers“ and for „producers“ - learn from publishing (traditional & web-based) - use staging ! Administrator Anonymous external user Application Server Author I NTERNET Integrator Internal user registered external user External users Repository Scientific Programs I NTRANET Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

13. Seite 13 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(2) Make life easy for consumers & producers - don‘t exclude important classes of users - „black-box“ integration: no internal modifications whatsoever - Provide „cheap“ UIs through generation - strive to re-use existing (G)UIs - Integration tools, perhaps web-based Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

14. Seite 14 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(2) Make life easy for consumers & producers - don‘t exclude important classes of users - „black-box“ integration: no internal modifications whatsoever - Provide „cheap“ UIs through generation - strive to re-use existing (G)UIs - Integration tools, perhaps web-based ID(na='Lambda',# Name pe='_NF and _Lambda_use',# precondition ty='FloatType', # type de='0.5',# default value ce='Lambda > 0.0', # constraint un='mu_m',# physical unit an='Input wavelength') # annotation Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

15. Seite 15 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(2) Make life easy for consumers & producers - don‘t exclude important classes of users - „black-box“ integration: no internal modifications whatsoever - Provide „cheap“ UIs through generation - strive to re-use existing (G)UIs - Integration tools, perhaps web-based Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

16. Seite 16 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing DLR VirtualLab: Concepts for broad adoption of e-Science(3) Integrate human-readable information with executable (software) resources - online help and background info - (computational) „service search engines“ for managing the new e- Science „resource deluge“ -Structured metadata are good, but documentation can serve as a good fallback „fingerprint“ Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer

17. Seite 17 Archivierungsangaben Institute for Remote Sensing Technology Innovation Management and Technology Marketing Conclusions e-Science will likely evolve to broad/ubiquitous e-Science support not only HPC users but the broader/general scientifc computing community to help that process, make life easy for A widely deployed Grid-based e-science infrastructure is a publshing medium - support the process by content management, leveraging suitable technologies Grid Content Evolution & Management - e-Science For The Rest Of Us T.Ernst, J.Wauer „ Grid content producers“ - strive for allowing black-box integration of apps & (G)UIs - provide integration tools „ Grid content consumers“ - don‘t exclude important groups - simple browser-based access for occasional users remains valuable