Slides from Cybera Summit 2010 Presentation: Collaborative Science: Technologies & Examples

Presentation I gave at Cybera Summit 2010 in Banff, AB (September 21 - 22, 2010). Discusses different Web 2.0 / social networking technologies that can enable collaborative science and example uses of these technologies as part of collaborative science portals/gateways. Examples include a few projects that the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary is involved in including: GeoChronos, CyberSKA and WaterCloud - all of these projects make use of the Elgg open source social networking platform.

Collaborative Science: Technologies & Examples

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Slides from GeoChronos Presentation at #bcnet10

Presentation I gave at BCNET/CANARIE Conference 2010 (May 4-5, 2010) in Vancouver. It gives an overview of GeoChronos - and on-line collaborative portal for earth observation scientists built on social networking and cloud computing technologies. The presentation is primarily composed of a mix of slides from previous GeoChronos presentations that I have given.

Enabling Collaboration Among Earth Observation Scientists with the GeoChronos Portal

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Slides from "GeoChronos: Challenges and Achievements" presentation at #OGF28

Presentation I gave at OGF 28 in Munich (Mar. 15-18, 2010). It is about challenges and achievements to date in the GeoChronos project, which is aimed at the development of an on-line collaborative environment for earth observation scientists. The presentation is also available on the OGF site along with other presentations from the same session.

GeoChronos: Challenges and Achievements

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#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

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

Well, I missed writing a highlights post yesterday, so I will write one for both yesterday and today.

SC09 continues to go great. A lot of excellent papers, posters, keynotes, exhibits, receptions and so forth.

Tuesday Nov. 17th started out with the opening keynote by Intel CTO Justin Rattner. A very good talk on "The Rise of the 3D Internet Advancements in Collaborative and Immersive Sciences". He posed the question "Is the future of HPC the 3D Web" and responded "The future of HPC is the 3D Web". Gave some excellent demos including ScienceSim, OpenSim, cloth simulation, fluid simulation and more. He finished the presentation off on a very high note by demonstrating Teraflop performance on
a single Larrabee chip!

After that I walked around the exhibit floor for a while. I stopped at the Purdue booth (#2473) and watched a HUBzero demonstration by Michael McLennan. HUBzero is a pretty cool collaborative platform for scientists that enables them to share presentations, papers and other materials and to run software/tools on-line. nanoHUB was the first hub created and now has 90,000 users and 5,000,000 hits per month. Hubs for other disciplines have been created since. I have been following this project for quite a while, and they have progressed quite a bit. It has many similarities to the GeoChronos platform that we are developing at the Grid Research Centre. It is definitely worth checking out. The tool they use to enable easy generation of graphical interfaces for applications mad available on-line, called Rappture, has already been made open source. HUBzero is supposed to be released as open source in Spring 2010. Looking forward to this.

In the afternoon I demonstrated GeoChronos at the Compute Canada - CANARIE booth (#142). GeoChronos is an on-line collaborative environment for earth observation scientists that leverages social networking, cloud computing and the Semantic Web. Slides used as part of the demonstration are available here.

Went to a technical paper session later in the afternoon that had a couple of papers that I was interested in:

• Improving GridFTP Performance Using The Phoebus Session Layer by E. Kissel et. al
• On the Design of Scalable, Self-Configuring Virtual Networks by D. I. Wolinsky et. al

After the technical paper session I attended the poster reception. A few posters that caught my interest were:

• Automatic Live Job Migration for HPC Fault Tolerance with Virtualization by Y. L. Pan
• A Policy Based Data Placement Service by M. A. Amer
• Mirroring Earth System Grid Datasets by E. Brady and A. Chervenak

Wrapped up the day by attending the Cray reception at the Hilton hotel downtown.

I got up early on Wednesday November 18th, to attend the SGI breakfast at the Doubletree hotel. Heard talks from the CEO, CTO as well as someone from E-bay and someone from Intel.

Had to catch up with some other work for the rest of the morning pertaining to a Green IT project called GreenStar Network that the Grid Research Centre is a partner on.
CANARIE just announced the $2 million funded project yesterday: http://bit.ly/4FAWmW

Gave another GeoChronos demonstration at the Compute Canada - CANARIE booth in the afternoon. Had a good chat with the CEO and CTO of GridCentric, a grid/virtualization startup based out of Toronto.

Walked around the exhibit floor for most of the rest of the afternoon, caught up with some people I had met from previous years. If you are looking for some good swag, try the TLCSquared Booth (#1801). Also attended part of an exhibitor forum and a BoF on NEESgrid.

Wrapped up the day with an excellent reception hosted by Mellanox at the Hilton downtown.
Heard from the CEO of Mellanox, Richard Kaufmann from HP and a researcher from ORNL.
Richard Kaufmann was quite the entertaining speaker. Speakers were followed by an excellent buffet dinner. With all the vendor receptions that happen during SC, I have heard it said "If you are paying for dinner, then you are doing something wrong".

Looking forward for the remaining two days of SC09. Will be giving a presentation entitled "Social Networking and Scientific Gateways" on Friday at 1:30p.m. at the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) workshop. The paper highlights our experiences in using Facebook, Ning and Elgg in developing scientific gateways. Come check it out if you haven't already caught your flight home.

Slides from GeoChronos demonstration at #SC09

Presentation shown as part of the GeoChronos Demonstration at the Compute Canada - CANARIE booth (#142) at SC09 in Portland on Nov. 17th and Nov. 18th, 2009. (Similar to the GeoChronos - CANARIE NEP Showcase Presentation with a few minor revisions.)

GeoChronos - SC09 Demo Presentation

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#SC09 Highlights - Monday Nov. 16th

Had a good day at SC09 in Portland today. I jumped between three different workshops that were going on today:

• WORKS09 : The 4th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science
• MTAGS09 : The 2nd Workshop on Many-Task Computing on Grids and Supercomputers
• Using Clouds for Parallel Computations in Systems Biology

Overall the presentations were pretty good. Each of the workshops had at least one paper centering around the use of Hadoop/MapReduce. Below are the list of papers/presentations that I found to be most interesting:

• "Making Infrastructure Invisible" - Dr. Dan Reed, Microsoft Corporate VP for Extreme Computing (MTAGS09 Keynote)
  • "Successful technologies are invisible."
  • "High value does not imply high utilization. Rapid response is often more important."
• "Robust Workflows for Science & Engineering" - David Abramson et. al (MTAGS09 Invited Paper)
  • Talked about Nimrod/K, the workflow engine for the Nimrod Toolkit. It is built on Kepler.
• "Lessons Learned From a Year's Worth of Benchmarks of Large Data Clouds" - Yunhong Gu and Bob Grossman (MTAGS09 Invited Paper)
  • Talked about Sector/Sphere - An open source high performance distributed file system and parallel data processing engine. Performance was shown to be significantly better than Hadoop.
  • Demos of Sector/Sphere are being given at the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) Booth (#1309)
    
• "Cloud Computing for Science" - Kate Keahey (Systems Biology Workshop)
  • Talked about Nimbus and Science Clouds

In the evening I attended the Opening Gala. Just took a browse around the exhibition floor tonight, so don't have any booth specific comments to add at this time. Will comment on booths/projects I found interesting in future blog posts this week.

Something else that is pretty cool and worth checking out is the Need4Feed site hosted by Purdue University. It is following the #SC09 hashtag on twitter and generating various rankings and statistics.

Tomorrow I will be giving a demonstration of GeoChronos - an on-line collaborative platform for earth observation scientists leveraging social networking, cloud computing and Semantic Web technologies. Come and check it out between 2pm - 3pm at the Compute Canada - CANARIE Booth (#142).

#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 GeoChronos Demonstration at CANARIE NEP Showcase Reception at #banff #summit09 #ogf27

Presentation shown as part of the GeoChronos Demonstration at the CANARIE NEP Showcase Dinner Reception at Summit 09 in Banff on Oct. 14, 2009.

GeoChronos - CANARIE NEP Showcase Presentation

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Slides from my presentation in the New Frontiers in Data Integration session at #banff #summit09 #ogf27

Presentation I gave as part of the New Frontiers in Data Integration session at Summit 09 in Banff on Oct. 14, 2009. It discusses some current work that the Grid Research Centre is doing in relation to data management and integration.

Integration and Management of Diverse Environmental Data Sets

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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.
  

Cyberinfrastructure and its Role in Science

I recently gave a presentation entitled "Cyberinfrastrucutre and its Role in Science" at IAI International Wireless Sensor Networks Summer School held at the University of Alberta on July 6th, 2009. This presentation examines some of the challenges scientists face and describes various cyberinfrastructure technologies that help address these challenges. Example projects employing cyberinfrastructure technologies that we have worked on at the Grid Research Centre, including the GeoChronos project, are also presented.

Cyberinfrastructure and its Role in Science

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GeoChronos Presentation/Demonstration given at SpecNet Workshop 2009.

I gave a presentation and demonstration of the GeoChronos platform at the SpecNet Workshop on June 22, 2009 in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada as part of the 30th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing. GeoChronos is an on-line platform for earth observation scientists, being developed by the Grid Research Centre, that is aimed at promoting collaboration and sharing of data and applications. The project is being funded as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms (NEP) Program. SpecNet builds on the existing capabilities of the flux tower network (FLUXNET) by adding spectral measurements to existing flux tower sites at a range of ecosystems around the world. It is a contributing organization to the GeoChronos project.

GeoChronos - SpecNet Workshop 2009 Presentation

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GeoChronos Presentation/Demonstration Given at CANARIE NEP-1 Synergy Workshop

One of the projects that the Grid Research Centre (GRC) is working on is GeoChronos (http://geochronos.org/), an on-line platform for earth observation scientists that facilitates collaboration, sharing of data and sharing of applications. It leverages social networking (Elgg) and cloud computing (ASPEN - another GRC project) technologies and is being funded as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms (NEP) Program.

Below is a presentation that a gave at the CANARIE NEP-1 Synergy Workshop in Winnipeg on April 21, 2009.

GeoChronos: An On-line Collaborative Platform for Earth Observation Scientists

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