Download - Tapia fireside chat-towns
November 17, 2013
Tapia Conference: Fireside Chat Slides
John Towns
PI and Project Director, XSEDE
Director, Collaborative Cyberinfrastructure Programs, NCSA
XSEDE Mission The eXtreme Science and Engineering
Discovery Environment (XSEDE): enhances the productivity of scientists and
engineers by providing them with new and innovative capabilities
and thus facilitates scientific discovery while enabling
transformational science/engineering and innovative educational programs
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XSEDE’s Objectives
• Understand the cyberinfrastructure requirements of the science and engineering research and education community
• Create a cyberinfrastructure ecosystem to facilitate improved researcher productivity
• Provide a unique user friendly interface to the resources and services accessible via XSEDE
• Maximize researcher productivity
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Major Future Technologies – how will these be used (a distributed cyberinfrastructure context)
• New environments for science and engineering research and education – beyond Science Gateways/application portals/etc. – oriented toward end user – customized/configurable for specific use
• New interfaces for interaction with these environments
– driven by what is familiar to the current teenager • immediate access to information—anytime, anywhere • multiple interaction modes and devices
– cell phones, tablets, laptops – keyboards, swiping, voice recognition
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Creating the capability to very simply create personalized environments for conducting the end-to-end set of processes in accomplishing research and education goals.
A Few Implications
• Back to the Future – everything is in the “cloud” – “cloud” will be redefined several times
• think client-server, VT100 terminals, thin clients and all the other names these fundamentally similar things have been called
– ..but will the pendulum swing again?
• Resurgence in comfort with all things being elsewhere (i.e. in the “cloud”) – expectations of availability of all things anywhere at anytime will be
very high! – …and this might again driving the pendulum!
• End user devices driven by the need to display and interact – we already see this emerging more and more extensively
• PCs are already seen as passing
• These abstractions make life easier for so many BUT, reduce dramatically those that know how the black boxes work – [John’s MatLab story…]
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Some Key Issues in Realizing Future
Technologies • “Old Guard” problem: pros and cons
– those that currently manage these environments • have a good handle on what works and what does not work • understand the current technology very well • know how to develop new capabilities that work
– BUT, they • don’t understand their kids and the mentality associated with how they interact with one
another and the digital world • struggle to effectively use these new interaction modalities; their kids consider them
second nature
• “IKEA syndrome” (at least one version)
– one inherently tends to see greater value in something in which they have invested themselves than others will
– THUS, those that have created the current environments perhaps see greater value in them that those that are trying to use them
• We are likely to lack those that can create anything not possible to assemble from the abstractions available – need people who know how the black boxes work and can modify them or
create new black boxes for others
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What Skills Will be Needed?
• Black Box Builders – those that can build the tools used by others to create their own
environments – we need developers: distributed systems, novel user interfaces, strong
software engineering
• Infrastructure Creators – those that can develop vision and execute it to create the
infrastructure to support these personalized environments – we need leaders: vision development, project leadership, influencing
the powers that be… – we need middle management: understanding of technology and how
to apply it, executing projects, managing humans – we need social engineers: understand the cultural contexts of the
diverse set of participants, develop processes cognizant of them, develop management structures and practices
• These are not mutually exclusive!!
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