GRID technologies for learning Pierluigi Ritrovato Centro di Ricerca in Matematica Pura ed Applicata OnLine Educa Berlin December Future Technology for Learning session

2 Outline What is the GRID The GRID history What is available GRID vs Web Why grid for Learning Some relevant projects

3 What are The Grid “The grid is an emerging infrastructure that will fundamentally change the way we think about - and use - computing. The grid will connect multiple regional and national computational grids to create a universal source of computing power.” The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Foster and Kesselman, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999

4 Grid has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, innovative applications, and, in some cases, high-performance orientation for problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations Source: Foster I., Kesselman C., Tuecke S. The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations January 2001 The Current GRID Vision

5 Outline What are the GRID The GRID history What is available GRID vs Web Why grid for Learning Some relevant projects

6 Where the Grid is coming from Work over the last decade on several distinct topics Metacomputing - combining distributed heterogeneous computing resources for solving a single problem Data Archiving - building collections of data on specific topics with open metadata catalogues and well-documented data formats Collaborative Working - network-based facilities for distributed, concurrent working on shared information Data visualization - large-scale immersive facilities for 3D visual interaction with data coupled to computational analysis Instrumentation control - remote control of experimental equipment and real time data gathering systems

7 Who are using the Grid? Physicists Large Hadron Collider Data Grid Engineers real-time visualisation, rapid turn-round simulation evaluation Astrophysicists searching across many instrument-specific data archives to study a new class of object at all wavelengths Environmentalists climate change, pollution Biologists Genome research, drugs design...

8 Outline What are the GRID The GRID history What is available GRID vs Web Why grid for Learning Some relevant projects

9 The current state 1 st Generation " involved local "Metacomputers" with basic services such as distributed file systems and site-wide single sign on, upon which adventurous software developers created distributed applications with custom communications protocols. 2 nd Generation began with projects such Condor, I-WAY (the origin of Globus), Legion (origin of Avaki) and UNICOR (from EU), 2G Grids offered basic building blocks, but deployment involved significant customization making interoperability problematic, and interoperability among 2G Grid systems is very difficult. 3 rd Generation The GGF community is taking lessons learned from 1G and 2G Grids and from web services technologies and concepts to create 3G architectures like the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) whereby a set of common interface specifications supports the interoperability of discrete, independently developed services. Source: GridToday October 27/2003 Vol 2 n.43 THE RISE OF THIRD-GENERATION GRIDS By Charlie Catlett, Global Grid Forum Chairman

10 OGSA the Open Grid Services Architecture Service orientation to virtualize resources Define fundamental Grid service behaviors A unifying framework for interoperability & establishment of total system properties Service description and discovery Service lifetime management Authentication, authorization, policy Notification Integration with Web services Leverage on commercial base standards Neutral wrt the hosting environment technologies and developing languages

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12 Grids and Industry: Early Examples Butterfly.net: Grid for multi-player games Entropia: Distributed computing

13 Europe vs USA Europe hones an edge in technology Continent leads U.S. in linking PC 'grids' By John Markoff and Jennifer L. Schenker/NYT (The New York Time) Tuesday, November 11, 2003 “… Novartis used American software technology to harness the power of its office PC's, but European and American scientists and government officials said Europe was moving faster than the United States to capitalize on the approach, which is called grid computing. “

14 EU funded projects in 5FP

15 Outline What are the GRID The GRID history What is available GRID vs Web Why grid for Learning Some relevant projects

16 GRID vs WEB Dynamic General resources sharing Scientific target Architecture oriented Aiming at standardising the behaviour Focused on interoperability, reliability and security Based on web standards Static Data sharing Business and masses target Infrastructure oriented Aiming at standardising the communication (protocols) Focused on sharing and collecting information

17 For More Information GRIDSTART Global Grid Forum GRID Today

18 Outline What are the GRID The GRID history What is available GRID vs Web Why grid for Learning Some relevant projects

19 Motivation lacks of existing (e)Learning practices and environments based on the information transfer paradigm with focus on the content and the “teacher” find the best way for presenting content in order to transmit information to learners Technology driven approach Missing specific didactical models all the students are considered the same finds its perfect technical mirror in the “page oriented approach to the Web” e-Learning becomes an activity in which teachers produce, and students consume, multimedia books on the Web

20 Motivation The Learning Paradigm Shift knowledge construction, rather than information transfer focus is on the learner and on the learning strategies Based on new forms of learning: Experiential and contextualised - the understanding of concepts through direct experience of their manifestation in realistic contexts Learning as a social process – active collaboration with other students, teachers, tutors, experts or, in general, available human peers Personalised learning - guarantee the learner will reach a cognitive excellence through different learning paths tailored on learner’s characteristics and preferences

21 Some characteristics of future learning scenarios Service Orientation Dynamism, dynamism, dynamism High demand of interoperability Open Architecture Security and Trust Multi institutional account and billing protocols

22 Why GRID technologies Are demonstrating their effectiveness for implementing e-Science infrastructure for sharing data, applications and knowledge Allow the virtualisation and sharing of several kind of resources facilitating the dynamic context generation Facilitate the realisation of ubiquitous computing concept Facilitate the realisation of emerging challenging learning scenarios through dynamic VO

23 Outline What are the GRID The GRID history What is available GRID vs Web Why grid for Learning Some relevant projects

24 Intelligent Web Teacher is an extensible application framework for building learning solutions It has been designed for facilitating the paradigm shift

25 GRASP GRID based Application Service Provision GRID  basic infrastructure for dynamic distributed computing OGSA Web Services  interfaces for remote procedure calls ASP  business concept between financially independent entities Flexible but proprietary ASP Interoperable component based ASP GRASP

27 ELeGI European Learning GRID Infrastructure FP6 Integrated Project under negotiation 23 partners from 8 EU Countries 4 years 5 test-beds

28 Ritrovato Pierluigi CRMPA – University of Salerno /2201 Useful Links ELeGI – coming soon! IWT – LeGE-WG - GRASP – GRIDSTART - Global Grid Forum - GRID Today -

29 Some future learning scenarios Field trip

30 future learning environment architecture Operating Systems OGSA Infrastructure OGSA generic services (orchestration, data mngt., logging, ) OGSA Domain Specific Services (user profiling, skill assessment, LO mngt, ontology mngt, …) Learning GRID Applications (Virtual Campus, Virtual Scientific Experiments, personalized mobile learning, …) Web services run time engine Physical resources