grid developments, the oxford e-science centre and itss

1PWJ/ ITSSG Conference

June 2002

Oxford Universitye-Science Centre

Grid Developments, the Oxford e-Science Centre and ITSS

Paul JeffreysDirector OUCS

Director Oxford e-Science Centre

http://e-science.ox.ac.uk/

[email protected]


June 2002


Talk Outline

• Summary of developments over last year– (Re-)Introduction to e-Science and the Grid– SR2000 e-Science allocation– OeSC

• Funds• Achievements• Team and Management• Access Grid

– Race through Oxford projects– SR2002 “e-Science” priorities

• What does it mean for IT SS and OU?– What will be needed?


June 2002


What’s in a name?!

• ‘Oxford e-Science Centre’ vs ‘Oxford Regional Grid Centre’• However:

– IBM Press Release quote (Aug. 2001): • “The driving force behind the evolutionary Grid Project is the

global scientific community”– e-Science funding!

• But in Oxford, much more than e-Science– …and clear change of emphasis in SR2002


June 2002


e-Science

• John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils, OST

– “e-Science means science increasingly done through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet, using very large data collections, terascale computing resources and high performance visualisation”

– "e-Science will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken"


June 2002


What is the Grid?

• “The Grid is a software infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources.” [The Grid, eds. Foster & Kesselman]

• “The Grid is an emergent infrastructure capable of delivering dependable, pervasive and uniform access to a set of globally distributed, dynamic and heterogeneous resources. It brings challenges of scalability, interoperability, fault tolerance, resource management and security.” [UK e-Science Director]


June 2002


Digital Mammography

• Example to fire the imagination (Brady et al.)!– 1.5 million screenings, 20% films lost, 80% false positive rate– 40% increase; radiographer rather than radiologist– -> need to develop standardised mammograms in federated

database– Enables ‘findonelikeit’ with clinical history– Principle generic


June 2002


SR2000 e-Science

• http://www.research-councils.ac.uk/escience/– “Research Councils invest £98M for e-Science”

• http://www.dti.gov.uk/ost/link/news/issue10_3.htm ForesightLINK, Issue No 10 Summer 2001– “The new £80m LINK programme for e-Science Grid

Technologies will spearhead the UK contribution to developing the next generation internet, supporting scientific research and e-business development in partnership with UK firms”

“If UK industry wants a place in the world of business [Grid] applications, it has to get involved now - at the academic research stage”


June 2002


£80m Collaborative projects

E-ScienceSteering

Committee

DG Research Councils

Director Director’s

Management RoleDirector’s

Awareness and Co-ordination Role

Generic Challenges EPSRC (£15m), DTI (£15m)

Industrial Collaboration (£40m)

Academic Application SupportProgramme

Research Councils (£74m), DTI (£5m)

PPARC (£26m) BBSRC (£8m) MRC (£8m) NERC (£7m) ESRC (£3m) EPSRC (£17m) CLRC (£5m)

Grid TAG

SR2000 e-Science Allocation


June 2002


Indicative Core Funding Breakdown

1. Grid Centres £7.0M + £11.5M + £11.0M2. Grid Middleware £2.5M £2.5M + £2.5M3. Grid IRC Projects £3.0M £1.0M + £4.0M4. Grid Support £2.0M5. International £1.0M6. GNT £1.5M £1.5M £1.5M7. Demonstrators £0.5M8. Pilots £1.0M £8.0M

______ ______ ______ £15M + £20M + £27M

OST DTI Industry


June 2002


UK Grid Network

Cambridge

Newcastle

Edinburgh

Oxford

Glasgow

Manchester

Cardiff

Soton

London

Belfast

DL

RAL Hinxton

£470k to ‘pass go’£1M pot – matched by industry

Oxford University Investment:-Associate Directors (RDF £85k), plus 3 posts phased (RDF £218k), plus some subsidised effort

Oxford has received£8M and rising!


June 2002


OeSC ‘Objectives’

• Establish Oxford as regional centre on national Grid– Thereby establish Grid connections for our researchers– Make our resources available on the Grid (part of the deal!)– Aim .. to become ‘Centre of Excellence’ -- NB SR2002

• Support groups throughout University undertaking national and international e-Science projects (and other Grid activities), collaborate with Oxford Brookes, and link with companies– Provide physical infrastructure– Provide support infrastructure:- registration, certificate

authorisation, training, documentation, security, services– Share development, coordinate and optimise across projects– Disseminate

• Commission ‘intranet Grid’– Share resources across university


June 2002


Status of Oxford e-Science Centre

• Formally launched 17 August – Associate Directors: David Gavaghan, Mike Giles, Mark Sansom, Jim

Davies– Web site … http://e-science.ox.ac.uk– Administrative Centre and Point-of-Contact (OUCS)

[email protected]– Strong connections with Business Liaison Unit (from the outset)– Connections established with OII and SBS– Technical Development:

• Access Grid installed in ComLab - and shortly in hospital-area• ‘Gate-keeper’ in OUCS running GLOBUS• 8 cpu Linux cluster running Condor scheduling

– Management Structure established– Building close relationship with RAL (A34 Corridor)– OUCS team built within Research Technologies Section, in Information

and Support Group– Oxford University is online!


June 2002


OeSC Management

• Substantial/important activity; needs appropriate structure– Management Board

• Overall ‘responsibility’ for delivery and operation of functional e-Science Centre, resources invested, accountability, outside relations and integration, and overseeing all e-Science and Grid activities in OU

– Technical/Development Board• High level management of e-Science/Grid activities,

internal resources invested on OeSC, coordination – Technical Committee

• Detailed internal technical management and organisation– User Committee

• Forum for Users working on e-Science and Grid projects, and for dissemination across the University


June 2002


Access Grid•Collection of resources that support formal and informal group-to-group interaction across the grid•Supports large-scale distributed meetings and collaborative work sessions


June 2002


Ambient mic(tabletop)

Presentermic

Presentercamera

Audience camera

Access Grid Technology

• Access Grid Collaboration – Enable collaborative work at

dozens of sites worldwide, with strong sense of shared presence

– Combination of commodity audio/video tech + Grid technologies for security, discovery, etc.

– 40+ sites worldwide, number rising rapidly

– Clear area of interest to OII– Second installation (Churchill?)

http://www.accessgrid.org


June 2002


Oxford Grid Project Overview

• Projects under different headings– Research Council Related

• EPSRC• DataGrid• Other RC and IRC

– OeSC Industrial• Company has to commit itself to Grid• Purpose is to ‘effect the connection’ and to disseminate

• Much more information available…!


June 2002


EPSRC e-Science Projects• EPSRC

– Grid Enabled Optimisation and Design Search for Engineering• Aim to develop a new way of optimising engineering design

through the use of a grid enabled design search service, and focusing on CFD

– Mike Giles– The RealityGrid – a tool for investigating condensed matter and

materials• Aim to use Grid technology to closely couple high

performance computing and visualisation (steering) to create an environment for modelling to be compared and to integrate with experimental data

– Adrian Sutton– Distributed Aircraft Maintenance

• Aim to build a generic grid testbed for distributed diagnostics of aircraft engines on a global scale

– Lionel Tarassenko


June 2002


DataGrid Projects

• Two projects each involving the use of computer science to underpin the implementation of Grid applications software – Grid security

- develop provably correct security protocols to ensure secrecy, integrity and authenticity

- Collaborators: OUCL (Gavin Lowe, Bill Roscoe, David Gavaghan), RAL, EU DataGrid Security Coordination group

– Data Management – with functionality checked• develop a distributed handling and job-submission system

for very large datasets arising in experimental particle physics and use software engineering techniques to ensure that the implementation has the correct functionality

– Collaborators: OUCL (Andrew Martin, Jim Davies, David Gavaghan, Todd Huffman, Ian McArthur), RAL, EU DataGrid WP 2


June 2002


Other R.C. Projects(1)

• PPARC– GridPP: National Centre and 4 regional Centres

– Todd Huffman, Ian McArthur, Tony Weidberg and many others

• EPSRC-MRC Interdisciplinary Research Consortium– ‘From Medical Signals and Images to Clinical Information’– Joint EPSRC/MRC IRC in Medical Imaging and Signals– Awarded £500K to develop and maintain the necessary Grid

infrastructure to support e-Science activities between the IRC consortium and the associated Regional e-Science Centres

– Mike Brady, Lionel Tarassenko, Alison Noble, Steve Smith

• BBSRC1. A Grid Database for Biomolecular Simulations (£700k + 10%)– Simulations, creating a federated database, with data mining

– Mark Sansom, Paul Jeffreys2. Molecular Consortium; Structural Biology

– David Stuart (WTCHG) representing Oxford Component


June 2002


Other R.C. Projects(2)

• MRC– Project looking at very large clinical trials of cancer utilising

genomic information; marrying genetic informations and clinical trial data

– Prof David Kerr (Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics)

• Reached the final stage of the MRC call

• NERC– Closely related to ‘ClimatePrediction’ project discussed below

• Wellcome– Working to establish Wellcome Grid Centre!

• …also other projects underway with e-Science component


June 2002


OeSC Industrial Projects…

• Collaborative Visualisation and Computational Steering• Project Leader: Ken Brodlie (Computer Science, Leeds

University) • Industrial Partners: NAG, Streamline Computing• Successful bid to Open Call

– A key generic enabling technology for Grid computing is

collaborative and remote visualisation and computational steering

– This project will address this in the context of steady and unsteady three-dimensional data arising from CFD calculations at Oxford and Imperial College, and the heart-modelling project described above

– The results will also be relevant to any scientific computations on an underlying computational mesh, using finite volume or finite element


June 2002


…OeSC Industrial Projects …

• Videoworks • Project Leader: David Shotton, Zoology Department• Industrial Partners: IBM, Informix, Virage• Funded -> £327k

– Aim to create a unified suite of generic and scalable video e-services specifically for the handling and analysing scientific digital video data files located in distributed file stores over high bandwidth academic Grid networks, with a particular emphasis on the usefulness of these video e-services for biomedical research


June 2002


… OeSC Industrial Projects…

• Remote use of scientific Instrumentation• Project Leader: David Cockayne (Materials)• Industrial Partner: JEOL• Submitted and awaiting response! (£250k)

– Micro-analytical instrumentation, such as transmission electron microscopes, electron probes and surface analysis equipment is becoming increasingly expensive, increasingly sophisticated

– Consolidation of infrastructure seems both inevitable and desirable

– Many instruments can now be operated (at least in part) remotely

– Purpose is to develop a capability for satisfying this need in electron optical instrumentation, and to put in place a demonstration national grid of access to sophisticated electron optical equipment


June 2002


… OeSC Industrial Projects …

• Climate Prediction• Project Leaders: Myles Allen, Dave Stainforth (Atmospheric

Physics)• Industrial Partners: IBM, RSL, up to 2 million PC owners

world-wide• Submitted last week £320k

– Recent studies have shown that atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) are capable of simulating some large-scale features of present-day climate and recent climate change with remarkable accuracy

– Aim is to develop techniques that will allow the use of up to 2 million home and business PCs to provide the first fully probabilistic 50-year forecast of human induced climate change

– New challenge of collecting (relatively) large data samples


June 2002


…OeSC Industrial Projects

• eDiamond (Digital Mammography)• Will be submitted to DTI as ‘special’ on Friday• Mike Brady, David Gavaghan, Paul Jeffreys• Expect to be £3M, but only need modest amount from OeSC

• Heterogeneous Workload Management and Grid Integration• IBM researcher on secondment to Oxford• Basically receive money for two staff!• Submit to DTI on Friday

– End to end response time monitoring and differentiated service applications running within Virtual Organisation

– Applied to e-Diamond


June 2002


OeSC Projects under development…

• Computational Drug Discovery• Project Leader: Graham Richards, Mark Sansom• Industrial Partners: Inhibox, Wellcome Trust?

– Following screensaver project, more computationally demanding calculations on binding of small molecules to proteins using the Grid

• Whole-heart Modelling• Project Leader: Denis Noble, David Gavaghan• Industrial Partners: The Wellcome Trust, possibly others

– Biological function arises from a complex interplay between processes at all levels of organisation -> comprehensive biological simulation of the whole-heart to be undertaken in a grid environment


June 2002


…OeSC Projects Under Development

• Fully Accessible Video for e-Learning• Oxford/Cambridge (Stuart Lee)• £412k• “Test water”…

– An e-Learning project to develop the use of high quality video-based resources for teaching, enabling random access to video data files while operating at streaming speeds

– Enables accurate access to precise points within datasources (eg down to sentences)

• Library Services• Matthew Dovey, David Price

– Looking for overlapping areas of interest, eg access to heterogeneous databases, methods for locating protocol gateways and information services, and distributed library architectures


June 2002


Is the Grid Niche or Mainstream?

• ‘A major development in 2001 has been the endorsement of the concept of the Grid by Microsoft, Sun and IBM’ (SR2002 bid)

• Irving Wladawsky-Berger (Lead for IBM Corporate on Grid)– ‘Grid computing is a set of research management services that sit

on top of the OS to link different systems together’– ‘We will work with the Globus community to build this layer of

software to help share resources’– ‘All of our systems will be enabled to work with the grid,

and all of our middleware will integrate with the software’

• Dave Turek (IBM’s Vice President of LINUX)– ‘IBM's Global Services division plans to build $4 billion worth of

such [Grid] "computer farms" around the globe’

• NeSC opened by Gordon Brown• Tony Blair’s talk …


June 2002


Blair’s speech on British Science

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/speeches/story/0,11126,721029,00.html

• “The emerging field of e-science should transform this kind of work. It's significant that the UK is the first country to develop a national e-science grid, which intends to make access to computing power, scientific data repositories and experimental facilities as easy as the web makes access to information. One of the pilot e-science projects is to develop a digital mammographic archive, together with an intelligent medical decision support system for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. An individual hospital will not have supercomputing facilties, but through the grid it could buy the time it needs. So the surgeon in the operating room will be able to pull up a high-resolution mammogram to identify exactly where the tumour can be found. “


June 2002


SR2002(1)

• SR2002 – distinct change of emphasis1. e-Learning

• Virtual Laboratories, AccessGrid and other Grid-enabled technologies

2. e-Government• Many of the heterogeneous data collections of Government

Departments should be federated using Grid middleware 3. Medical and Healthcare Informatics

• Grid middleware to maintains privacy and trust; need to strengthen links with NHS activities

4. e-Environment• Grid infrastructure needs to be applied to a wide variety of

environmental problems ranging from monitoring endangered species or traffic flows to flood warning systems or pollution monitoring


June 2002


SR2002(2)

5. e-Business– By the end of the SR2002 period, robust, industrial-strength

Gridmiddleware will be available -> ‘Virtual Organisations’ -> multi-company business opportunities

6. International e-Science collaboration– e-Science …s UK programme fits well into the EU’s

European Research Area initiative7. Military applications of Grid technologies

– Joint programme should be established with the MOD 8. Security

– Vital area of concern for the Grid and requires a focused sub-programme of R&D looking at the needs of the different application areas


June 2002


SR2002 OST resources

SR2000 Programme SR2002

15.0 Core 20.0

(20.0) (DTI) (25.0)

8.0 BBSRC 15.0

5.0 CLRC 9.3

17.0 EPSRC 19.5

3.0 ESRC 8.5

8.0 MRC 10.0

7.0 NERC 10.0

26.0 PPARC 45.0

89.0 Total 137.3


June 2002


SR2002 conclusions

• More money requested for e-Science than in SR2000– Up to now Oxford University received > £8M and growing

• Activity is now mainstream– We are building a special relationship with IBM

• Different emphases from SR2000– Clearly advantage to Oxford– Healthcare prominent!

• We need to be preparing for SR2002– OeSC – building projects in the key areas and competing!– Preparing to bid against the RC funds


June 2002


Implications for ITSS

• Role of Computing Services and IT Support in Infrastructure– Generally understood that the Grid will form part of the basic IT

infrastructure of the modern University• Meeting May 1, NeSC – e-Science Developers/Computing

Services– ‘Goal is to have the advantages of the infrastructure, but not

visible to user’

• Oxford uniquely placed – and leading• Computing Services becoming more important as move from

Level 1 Grid (basic Grid functionality for one-off tests) to Level 2 Grid (persistent, robust, 24X7)

• Majority of e-Science money in Oxford invested in applications

– How do we support the researchers, who generally are not Grid experts?


June 2002


What will it mean for IT SS (1) ?

• Our IT users– “I need a digital certificate to access my collaborators’ computing

resources”• Authentication by University of Oxford

– “I need authorisation to use the database and Beowulf cluster at..”• Authorisation through their collaboration, but coordinated and

facilitated here– “I need to be able to use my digital certification to launch jobs into the

‘AstroGrid”• Means variety of things:

– Knowing how to send secure requests with digital certificates– How to launch jobs (different schedulers)

• Substantial help from OeSC will be available– “I need to advertise the resources here in Oxford to my collaboration

(or I need to find out what resources are available)”• Need to be able to advertise/interrogate MDS GIIS/GIS services


June 2002


What will it mean for IT SS (2) ?

• Collaborators from outside Oxford wishing to use facilities owned by our users– “A collaborator based at … needs to access the OU

SuperComputer and database”• Your user will need a ‘Grid Client’ or gatekeeper (could be

central one or one set up locally)– This will need to receive his/her collaborator’s digital certificate

• He/she will need to be authorised to use the facilities• You will need to take care of firewall and other security

issues– “My collaborator has launched a job which requires facilities at

Oxford, but it is running slowly/does not work”• At least will need to know how to route questions!


June 2002


Likely questions from IT SS (1)• "How much am I going to need to know?“

– Not need to know intricacies of the Grid (unless wish to!)– Basic understanding will probably be necessary– Some exciting opportunities!

• "Where can I get help?“– OeSC point of information: [email protected]

• Routed through RT to expert• All learning together to some extent!• Applications will build up considerable expertise which must be

able to draw upon• “How much of an additional workload is the introduction of the Grid is

likely to impose upon me?”– Hard to be sure– At the moment – specifically related to scientific applications, but could

be much broader– How would you answer the question if asked about WWW?– Certainly true that expertise being built up across most Universities– Perhaps will mean closer association with application teams


June 2002


Likely questions from IT SS (2)

• “Should I be responsible for supporting users’ collaborators?”– Ideally it should all balance out!– I suspect for some time it will operate through well defined

mini-Grids (eg the Dame Grid)– The project itself will offer support

• “How can I be kept informed and/or contribute?”– email [email protected]– Training will be made available– Partnership needed


June 2002


Summary

• e-Science and the Grid are now mainstream– Will have profound effect on the University

• Oxford has extremely exciting Grid projects• OeSC is one of the main centres within a world leading

national Grid installation• Opportunity for OU to really lead the way in terms of creating

a persistent, robust IT infrastructure– Must be done in partnership

• Collaboration between IT SS, OeSC, OUCS and application researchers will be needed


June 2002


Conclusions

• SR2000 investment in e-Science has been successful• OeSC is well advanced, managerially and technically• Oxford has been very successful in bidding against RC

funds• The Industrial Projects are well developed and we will

be one of the first Centres to allocate our funds!• Over the last year, the Grid has become mainstream• Definite change of emphasis in SR2002 e-Science bid• Oxford should be preparing now..• There will be profound implications for the University

and for IT SS!

grid developments, the oxford e-science centre and itss

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