Cyberinfrastructure Update

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Cyberinfrastructure Update

• Russ Hobby

Cyberinfrastructure Architect UC Davis
Program Manager Internet2
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Nature of Todays Research

• Research by Discipline Groups
• Researchers at Multiple Organizations
• They use technology to work as a team
• There is often more connection within the
  Discipline Group than to researchers institution

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What do Researchers Want?

• Data Collection
• Computation and Data Manipulation
• Visualization
• Sharing Resources
• Location Independent Collaboration
• Good Performance in all Technology Used
• Good Security that does not inhibit ease of use
  or performance

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Problems Currently Faced

• Different human interfaces for each system
• Components not compatible with each other
• Not Easy to switch or combine resources
• Access Management different for each system
• Performance problems when switching component
  configurations

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Performance

• CI is a System. Individual components may perform
  well but the overall performance depends on the
  components working well together.
• Work is needed so that users can determine the
  best combination of components and how to
  determine the problem when there are performance
  is lacking

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Security

• Security is often a hindrance to the user and to
  performance
• Without a coordinated CI system, each component
  must provide security against all other components

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Whats New in CI at NSF

• Ed Seidel Director of the Office of
  Cyberinfrastructure
• Jennifer Schopf joins OCI
• Complex problems from science to humanities drive
  everything
• Increasingly, DATA is the big problem, not
  compute cycles themselves
• Need to develop coherent, integrated high
  performance CI from campus to national level

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OCI Task Forces

• CI Reuse (internal)
• TF1 Software
• TF2 Campus Bridging
• TF3 Education and workforce development
• TF4 Computing infrastructure (HPC, clouds,
  grids...)
• TF5 Data, Visualization
• TF6 Grand Challenge Communities VOs and next
  generation grand challenge applications

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NSF Questions

• NSF, CIOs positioned to address CI issues with
  strategic research perspective
• What would you like to see NSF do to help support
  campus CI and drive campus-national CI
  integration? (Or anything else?)
• How best to partner on the Task Forces?
• How to best help us promote computational science
  agenda on campuses?
• What would you like to see if stimulus funding
  comes?

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CI Days Workshops

• Started by TeraGrid, Open Science Grid,
  Internet2, NLR and EDUCAUSE, and now other
  regional and national groups have come together
  to help campuses in their CI planning.
• CI Days are held by campuses to assist in
  their CI planning. The workshop brings together
  players from the campus, region and nation to
  share information and plan how to provide CI
  functions for the campus.
• Campus participation typically includes faculty,
  IT staff, librarians and administrators
• The national and regional groups will also learn
  about the campus needs to help better direct the
  evolution of the services.

www.cidays.org
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UC Grid Vision

• Provide a uniform, consistent interface to
  resources for researchers even as resources
  change
• Expand to other CI resources such as
  visualization, specialized instrumentation and
  data repositories
• Provide control mechanisms to accommodate private
  and shared resources
• Integrate with resources outside the UC System

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UC Grid Summit, April 1, 2009, UCLA http//www.ats
.ucla.edu/cfapps/events/rsvp/RSVPNow.cfm?EveID290
5SecID2902
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State Efforts?

• Should the UC Grid concept be extended to all CA?
• CSU has needs for multiple campus resources
• Caltech, USC and Stanford wrestle with similar
  issues
• Possibilities for Green State-wide resources?

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CI is not just for Researchers

• The current focus on CI is its use by
  Researchers. However this is an emerging
  technology that will be used by all, just as the
  individual computer and the Internet has become a
  regular work tool.

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What Can We Do to Make CI Better?

• Define an overarching architecture that fully
  defines the function each CI component.
• Define the detailed interface for communications
  between components
• Let specialized groups work on the details within
  a component to implement the function and adhere
  to the interface
• Performance Monitoring and Security built into
  all components, not added on later

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Reusable Software Modules

• Component architecture broken into Subcomponents
  with well defined interfaces
• Software modules written to implement the
  Subcomponent
• Applications are built by linking together
  standard software modules

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More Info

• Russ Hobbyrdhobby_at_internet2.edu530-863-0513