#SC09 Highlights - Thursday Nov. 19th and Friday Nov. 20th

Another SC has come and gone, and overall I really enjoyed it again this year. It is one of my favorite conferences to attend each year.

In this posting I will provide some highlights for Thursday Nov. 19th and Friday Nov. 20th.
Highlights from previous days of the conference can be found at the below links:

• #SC09 Highlights - Monday Nov. 16th
• #SC09 Highlights - Tuesday Nov. 17th and Wednesday Nov. 18th

Thursday Nov. 19th, started out with the keynote by Al Gore on climate change. He is a very good speaker. At times he was quite humorous, and at other times he was quite serious. Some quotes from his talk are below:

• As much urban habitat will be developed in the next 35 years than has ever been developed.
• In the last 100 years the earth's population has quadrupled from 1.6 billion to 6.8 billion.
• By beginning of next year there will be 1 billion transistors for each of the 6.8 billion people on earth.
• Climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral issue.

After the keynote I attended an exhibitor forum on Virtualization and Cloud Computing and then walked around the exhibit floor some more. At 12:15 I attended the "HPC Saving the Planet, One Ton of CO2 at a Time" BoF. One thing we were told that was worth taking a look at was the Smart 2020 report. After the BoF I went back and finished my tour of the exhibit floor. At 2:15 p.m. I attended the Masterworks session titled "High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons Learned at Facebook" by Robert Johnson. It was a full session, and I even had to wait for some room to free up after the previous session, before being allowed to go in. Security was quite strict on fire regulations this year. No standing allowed in session rooms, and no sitting against the walls out in the lobby. Robert talked about how Facebook was managing data. A few interesting and impressive statistics about Facebook that he mentioned are as follows:

• > 300 million users
• 200 billion monthly page views
• 1 billion chat messages per day

After the Facebook Masterworks session I attended a technical paper presentation: "VGrADS: Enabling e-Science Workflows on Grids and Clouds with Fault Tolerance". I then took a break before heading downtown to the Technical Program Reception at the Portland Center for Performing Arts where there was plenty of food and entertainment.

On Friday November 20th, I attended the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) Workshop.
In the afternoon of the workshop I presented a paper co-authored by Roger Curry, myself and Rob Simmonds entitled "Social Networking and Scientific Gateways". The paper describes different approaches for integrating social networking in scientific gateways, and highlights our experiences using Facebook, Ning and Elgg in developing the GeoChronos scientific gateway. Slides for that presentation are available here. Being the afternoon of the last day I had anticipated not many being in attendance. However, there were still about 40 people in the room which I thought was pretty good. Wireless was still running, even though we were told it was going to be cut off at 12:00, so I was able to give a brief live demonstration of GeoChronos at the end of the presentation.

Overall, the day was full of many excellent papers. I was quite interested by several of the papers that were making use of iGoogle and OpenSocial gadgets. There was also an interesting paper on a TeraGrid user portal designed for mobile phones. A list of the papers I found most interesting is below. Slides for these and other papers from the workshop can be found here.

• Lan Zhao, Shuang Wu, Rakesh Veeramacheneni, Carol Song and Larry Biehl. "Delivering Real-time Satellite Data to a Broader Audience"
• Rion Dooley, Stephen Mock, Praveen Nuthulapati, Patrick Hurley and Maytal Dahan. "Evolving Interfaces to Impacting Technology: The Mobile TeraGrid User Portal"
• Wenjun Wu, Thomas Uram and Michael E. Papka. "Web 2.0 Based Social Informatics Data Grid"
• Zhenhua Guo, Raminderjeet Singh and Marlon Pierce. "Building the PolarGrid Portal Using Web 2.0 and OpenSocial"

Slides from "Social Networking and Scientific Gateways" presentation at #SC09

Presentation I gave as part of the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) Workshop at SC09 in Portland on Nov. 20, 2009. Describes different approaches for integrating social networking in scientific gateways, and highlights our experiences using Facebook, Ning and Elgg in developing the GeoChronos scientific gateway. Paper can be found here.

Social Networking and Scientific Gateways

View more presentations from Cameron Kiddle.

#SC09 demo schedule for the @GeoChronos scientific gateway (Visit booth 142)

I will be demonstrating the GeoChronos scientific gateway (http://geochronos.org/) at SC09 in Portland. GeoChronos, which is funded as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms (NEP) program, is an on-line collaborative platform for earth observation scientists that leverages social networking, cloud computing and Semantic Web technologies.

Demonstrations will take place at the Compute Canada - CANARIE booth (#142) at the following times:

Tuesday Nov. 17th: 2pm - 3pm
Wednesday Nov. 18th: 2pm - 3pm

Note that on Friday Nov. 20 at 1:30 p.m. I will be presenting a paper entitled "Social Networking and Scientific Gateways" as part of the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) workshop at SC09. It is a paper co-authored by Roger Curry, myself and Rob Simmonds that compares several approaches for integrating social networking into scientific gateways. It highlights our experience using Facebook, Ning and Elgg in the development of GeoChronos.

Slides from Cloud Challenge Demonstration at #banff #summit09 #ogf27

Presentation I gave as part of a demonstration highlighting cloud computing and social networking efforts of the Grid Research Centre at the Cloud Challenge at Summit 09 in Banff on October 13, 2009.

Dynamic Provisioning of Service Environments with ASPEN

View more presentations from Cameron Kiddle.

Schedule of GRC Presentations/Demonstrations at Summit 09

I will be giving several presentations/demonstrations on behalf of the Grid Research Centre (GRC) at Summit 09 in Banff from Oct. 12 - Oct. 16, 2009. Below is the schedule. Please come check them out if you will be at Summit 09!

• 6:30p.m., Tuesday Oct. 13, 2009 - Dynamic Provisioning of Service Environments with ASPEN as part of the Summit 09 Cloud Challenge
  
  • I will demonstrate a cloud-based infrastructure for dynamically provisioning virtualized resources called the Automated Service Provisioning ENvironment (ASPEN) , which we developed at the GRC in collaboration with HP Labs. I will showcase two different dynamically provisioned service environments that we are hosting in an ASPEN instance running on the HP Labs Data Centre at the University of Calgary. One is a comprehensive user environment for the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) that allows users to upload and edit input files, submit simulations, interactively visualize results and share results via a Facebook based interface. The other, developed as part of a Cybera funded pilot project, is a graphical rendering environment built on top of the Elgg open source social network platform that enables users to render and share animations/movies. Virtual resources running the services for these environments are dynamically provisioned/reclaimed based on user demand.
    
• 10:30a.m., Wednesday Oct. 14, 2009 - Integration and Management of Diverse Environmental Data Sets as part of the New Frontiers in Data Integration Session
  • I will give a presentation discussing some projects that the GRC is working on that involve managing and integrating a variety of environmental data sets. I will discuss the use of Semantic Web technologies such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for linking and mapping data and associated metadata and also provide some demonstrations of initial prototypes we have developed.
    
• 6:00p.m., Wednesday Oct. 14, 2009 - GeoChronos: An On-line Collaborative Environment for Earth Observation Scientists as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms Exhibition
  
• We will demonstrate a platform called GeoChronos that we are developing as part of a CANARIE funded Network Enabled Platforms (NEP) project. It is an on-line platform leveraging social networking, cloud computing and Semantic Web technologies that is aimed at enabling earth observation scientists to access and share scientific data and applications more easily and to collaborate more effectively.
  

GRC to Give Cloud Computing/Social Networking Demo at SC08

I will be giving a demonstration of some of the research the Grid Research Centre (GRC) is working on at SC08 in Austin next week. Below are the details.

Where: Compute Canada Booth #2439 (at SC08 in Austin, Texas)

When:

• Tuesday November 18, 2008: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
• Wednesday November 19, 2008: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
  

Title: Leveraging Social Networking and Cloud Computing Technologies in the Development of Collaborative Computing Environments

Abstract: Social networking and cloud computing technologies are revolutionizing the way computing resources are accessed and managed. At the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary, and in collaboration with HP Labs, we are exploring how these technologies can be leveraged to develop comprehensive and collaborative computing environments. We have developed a cloud-based infrastructure called the Automated Service Provisioning ENvironment (ASPEN) that dynamically allocates virtualized resources to different services based on demand. Two prototype collaborative computing environments will be demonstrated. One uses the Facebook social networking platform to provide users with one-stop shop access to the Fire Dynamics Simulator and affiliated services. The other uses the Ning social networking platform to provide access to an animation rendering service. Services for both environments are hosted on the ASPEN cloud-based infrastructure.