A centre of expertise in digital information management Introducing Research Grids and e-Science – whats in it for the Humanities? Dr Liz.

A centre of expertise in digital information management

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Introducing Research Grids and e-Science – what’s in it for the Humanities?

Dr Liz Lyon,

Director, UKOLN

DRH2003University of Gloucestershire

A centre of expertise in digital information management

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Overview

• Setting the context - a little bit of history

• The UK e-Science Programme

• Research – some common challenges

• What’s happening now?

• Opportunities…..

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“Grid computing refers to the large-scale integration of computer systems via high speed networks to provide on-demand access to data-crunching capabilities and functions not available to one individual or group of machines”

Ian Foster, Scientific American April 2003

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“Grid technology enables large-scale scientific and business collaboration among members of virtual organizations, remote experimentation and high-performance distributed computing and data analysis”

Ian Foster, Scientific American April 2003

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The Grid 1967 – 2003 Part 1 With acknowledgement to Rob Baxter (NeSC)

• 1967 World’s first packet-switched network• 1973 Ethernet demo at Xerox PARC• 1976 First Cray-1 “super-computer”• 1984 JANet built• 1988 Condor project begins – earliest “cycle scavenger” or scheduler –

ideal tool for Grid??• 1991 WWW created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN• 1993 Legion project launch – used Grid Object model• 1994 Nimrod project launch – co-ordinates tasks across a network• 1997 UNICORE project starts – combined toolkit and portal model• 1997 Storage Resource Broker v1.0 – client server middleware connecting

to heterogeneous datasets based on attributes• 1998 The GRID book – Foster & Kesselman

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The Grid 1967 – 2003 Part 2

• 1998 Globus v1.0.0 – the leading Grid toolkit – Defines standards for security, resource discovery, data access & transfer, remote job

execution– Layered architecture– Single sign-on

• 2001 March Global Grid Forum 1• 2001 March Web Services IBM – “provided a sea-change in Grid thinking”• 2001 July UK e-Science Programme Phase 1 launch• 2001 November GEANT activated – pan-European gigabit network• 2002 February OGSA–DAI (Open Grid Services Architecture-Data Access & Integration)

project launched – UK Grid Core Programme with DTI, IBM, Oracle partners, “a marriage of Globus and Web Services”

• 2003 March Open Grid Services Infrastructure OGSI V1.0 spec• 2003 July UK e-Science Programme Phase 2 planning• 2003 September 2nd All Hands meeting in Nottingham tomorrow…….

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UK e-Science Programme

“e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will

enable it.”

Dr John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils

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UK e-Science Programme Phase 1 2001 - 2004

• Professor Tony Hey, Director• Government funds from OST and DTI +

industry matching• £74M application projects• £35M Core Programme (CP)• CP managed by EPSRC for Research Councils• To advance the development of robust and

generic Grid middleware in collaboration with industry

• http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/

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Cambridge

Newcastle

Edinburgh

Oxford

Glasgow

Manchester

Cardiff

Soton

London

Belfast

DL

RLHinxton

LancasterSocial Sciences

White Rose

Birmingham/Warwick Modelling

BristolMedia

UCL

UK e-Science Grid & Centres of ExcellenceWith acknowledgement to Tony Hey

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                                                              Powering the Virtual Universehttp://www.astrogrid.ac.uk(Edinburgh, Belfast, Cambridge, Leicester, London, Manchester, RAL)

Multi-wavelength showing the jet in M87: from top to bottom – Chandra X-ray, HST optical, Gemini mid-IR, VLA radio. AstroGrid will provide advanced, Grid based, federation and data mining tools to facilitate better and faster scientific output.

Picture credits: “NASA / Chandra X-ray Observatory / Herman Marshall (MIT)”, “NASA/HST/Eric Perlman (UMBC), “Gemini Observatory/OSCIR”, “VLA/NSF/Eric Perlman (UMBC)/Fang Zhou, Biretta (STScI)/F Owen (NRA)”

:

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myGrid Project

• Imminent ‘deluge’ of data

• Highly heterogeneous• Highly complex and

inter-related• Convergence of data

and literature archives• Virtual workbench

Comb-e-Chem Project

X-Raye-Lab

Analysis

Properties

Propertiese-Lab

SimulationVideo

Diff

ract

omet

er

Grid Middleware

StructuresDatabase

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What are the common challenges?

• Research is increasingly data–intensive• New approaches require new skills

(IT+statistics+domain)• Inter-disciplinary e.g. Astro-informatics• Collaborative: virtual communities • Knowledge-rich infrastructures: development of

ontologies, terminology servers• Highly distributed resource utilisation –

instruments, bibliographic collections, primary data

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Resources are used in new ways

• Spatial change– Federation, aggregation, dis-aggregation, replication,

manipulation, linking, annotation, editing/versioning, transformation

• Knowledge extraction– Analysis (textual, musical, statistical, mathematical,

visual, chemical, gene……)– Mining (text, data, structures……)– Modelling (economic, mathematical, biological..)– Presentation (visualisation, rendering….)

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What is happening now?

• Planning for Core Programme 2 2003-2006• Digital libraries and e-Science

– Joint UKOLN / NeSC workshops– Digital Curation Centre call– EPSRC/JISC funded projects such as eBank (with Combechem)

see Ariadne article http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/lyon/

– National Centre for Text Mining call

• e-Social Science – Centre of Excellence Lancaster ESRC April 2004– Awareness & Training Environment JISC August 2003

• Humanities ???

A centre of expertise in digital information management

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A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Some possible applications in the humantities?

• Complex text mining across distributed documents – multi-lingual processing??

• Visualisation and modelling of historically linked archaeological sites

• Real-time retrieval and image analysis of multiple video streams – news and media??

• New distributed and collaborative performance scenarios

• ?????

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Opportunities for collaboration…….