Proposal

A proposal to initiate a sustainable collaboration

Over the last decade we have seen an increase in international efforts to address global problems as well as the increasing impact of information technology on the conduct of science. Three examples of international efforts include the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (http://www.gbif.org) (see Edwards et al) to make biodiversity data freely available, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (http://www.igbp.kva.se/cgi-bin/php/frameset.php) whose mission is to deliver scientific knowledge to help human societies develop in harmony with Earth’s environment, the Global Terrestrial Observing system (http://www.fao.org/gtos) whose mission is to provide the scientific and policy making community with access to the data necessary to manage the change in the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to support sustainable development. Other inter-related national efforts include the national virtual observatories (in the United States at http://www.srl.caltech.edu/nvo/, and at http://www.research-councils.ac.uk/escience/ in the United Kingdom) and the high-energy physics community (see http://www.eu-datagrid.org/ for the European Data Grid effort, and http://www.griphyn.org for a United States based effort). These later efforts illustrate most clearly how the interrelationship between science and technology is enhancing both. It also illustrates how new types of international collaborations are being formed, by tackling large problems that require resources from around the globe. These examples are directly tied to the development to the Grid.

"Grid is a new Information Technology (IT) concept of "super Internet" for high-performance computing: worldwide collections of high-end resources – such as supercomputers, storage, advanced instruments and immersive environments. These resources and their users are often separated by great distances and connected by high-speed networks. The Grid is expected to bring together geographically and organisationally dispersed computational resources, such as CPUs, storage systems, communication systems, real-time data sources and instruments, human collaborators." (from http://www.aei.mpg.de/~manuela/GridWeb/info/grid.html, also Foster and Kesselman).

Many experts believe that the " Grids will Transform Computing" (see Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM Server Group Vice President of Technology and Strategy, http://www.ibm.com/servers/events/grid.html). Dr Wladowsky-Berger notes:

In response to the needs of scientists as well as heeding the advice of individuals like Dr. Wladowsky-Berger, the scientific community, as well as nations, have begun to establish standards groups and to make national investments. "The Global Grid Forum (GGF, http://www.globalgridforum.org) is a community-initiated forum of individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or "grid" technologies. GGF is the result of a merger of the Grid Forum in the United States, the eGrid European Grid Forum, and the Grid community in Asia-Pacific. … The GGF mission is to focus on the promotion and development of Grid technologies and applications via the development and documentation of "best practices," implementation guidelines, and standards with an emphasis on "rough consensus and running code". The Asia-Pacific Grid (http://www.apgrid.org/default.htm) is a consortium that with a goal to provide "Grid environments around Asia-Pacific region.  APGrid is a meeting point for all Asia-Pacific High Performance Computing and Networking researchers.  It acts as a communication channel to the Global Grid Forum, and other Grid communities."

As has been noted already, the European Union has invested in the establishment of a EU-Data Grid (see http://www.eu-datagrid.org/), driven by the needs of strategic science investments in areas of high-energy physics, biology and medical imaging processing, and earth observations; similarly the United Kingdom has invested in its e-Science Programme at http://www.research-councils.ac.uk/escience/, the United States has invested in this infrastructure via several funding initiatives, such as NASA’s Information Power Grid (http://www.ipg.nasa.gov/) and NSF most recently via an award to its two Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) Programs, in the TeraGrid (http://www.teragrid.org/) .

We have had experience in our attempts to make real the application of telescience between the United States and Japan, where two online telemicroscopy systems, one at NCMIR and one at Osaka, use international research networks to provide interactive, remote control of high-power microscopes (see http://www.transpac.org, or http://www-ncmir.ucsd.edu/CMDA or http://www.uhvem.osaka-u.ac.jp/official/news.html). While such experiments are possible, they are far from routine, and very tedious, both in scheduling and tuning the network, but also in the handling of the data. There is too much human intervention needed to make this exciting use of the grid routinely possible. For the Grid to work for a wider variety groups, more automation, more favorable use policies for allocation and scheduling, and increased collaboration is needed.

This example illustrates one goal of using resources to collaborate on science as well as indicating the difficulty of making the various components of the Grid, namely the hardware (computer, networking), the software, and the applications work as one.

In summary, the type of problems scientist address increasing take on global proportions. The science Grid, where information technology (computers, storage, networks) meets applications and scientific instruments, is exploding in both size and scope, and holds the potential to address many global science issues. However, much work needs to be done to make the Grid usable.

There are two overall goals of the PRAGMA activity aimed at the Asia Pacific Region. First, establish a community of researchers and technologists together that will accelerate daily use of the Grid for advancing science through: developing the software, addressing scheduling and allocation issues across institutional and international boundaries; running applications on the infrastructure to significantly influence its buildout; and working with standards bodies (such as Global Grid Forum (GGF) or the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)) to expand the impact of our experiences and ensure longevity and interoperability. Second, build sustained collaborations, among the various stakeholders, namely builders and developers of the Grid, scientists and researchers of the Grid, graduate students of both of these groups, to have a lasting influence on international collaborations.

Because our focus is on applications and grid middleware, we wish to bring together researchers and technologists in a series of meeting to collaboratively expedite application use of the Grid, and use that specific applications as our guide to making the Grid live to its potential of a single computing platform.

1. Host a first workshop, to be held in San Diego, 11-12 March 2002.
2. Support travel of US based scientists to subsequent workshops in this series. At this stage the new workshops are planned for 10-12 July 2002 to be hosted by the Korea Institute for Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and for Fall or Winter 2002/2003 in Japan.
3. Support travel of US based scientists to iGRID meeting 24 —26 September 2002 to demonstrate progress of PRAGMA application.
4. Participate and lead efforts between meetings such as establish web sites and continue to increase involvement and resource (e.g. computer) commitments from various groups.

We feel that through this series of meetings we will build strong collaborations and have enough meetings to make progress.

In addition to the overall goals of PRAGMA, namely to establish a community of researchers and technologists together that will accelerate daily use of the Grid for advancing science and to build sustained collaborations, we have specific goals for this first meeting. By end of the first meeting we plan to have produced a gap analysis of applications on running on the grid, namely we to understand concretely what are the roadblocks (technical, institutional, national) between our current state of affairs and a routine use of that application would look like in the grid environment. Furthermore, we would develop a plan to address those barriers over the course of the subsequent year.

To bring our experiences to a broader audience, and to motivate progress to addressing some of these issues, we plan to use the iGRID 2002 meeting in Amsterdam (with a theme of what can you do with a 2.5 gigabit lambda) September 2002 http://www.startap.net/starlight/iGRID2002 as a milestone of having made progress on one or more applications, and to use PRAGMA to focus a Pacific Rim response to the iGRID challenge.

Since this will be the first meeting of the group, we expect to have a mixture of background talks (for all of the participants to understand the resources available, the various software projects, and the possible applications to drive the progress of PRAGMA) and discussions (barriers to progress).

As PRAGMA is envisioned, it is an open organization to all organizations in the Pacific Rim that align with the goals of PRAGMA. To maintain continuity between meetings and to help maintain interest and focus for the group, we will explore a steering structure with some of the following attributes:

Each meeting will have co-Program Chairs, responsible for the agenda for the meeting as well as the local arrangements. We feel for the sake of continuity that for any given meeting, one co-chair should be from the host site (as part of the host-sites commitment to PRAGMA) and the other co-chair should be from the institution that has agreed to host the subsequent meeting. Thus, the first Program Co-Chairs are Phil Papadopoulos (UCSD) and a representative from KISTI. The remaining program committee would be selected from the broader PRAGMA participants to reflect the agenda.

To provide institutional oversight and commitment, we will have a steering committee who will approve the final agenda, help in the selection of the sites, and set priorities for building PRAGMA (see list of possible activities below) and assist in helping overcome institutional and national barriers to making the applications successful. We will discuss details of this at the first meeting, but we anticipate that the members of each institution that have agreed to host a meeting would have one or two representatives on the steering committee. The steering committee might be rounded out by experts or application individuals. In the case of UCSD two initial members of the committee would be Peter Arzberger and Philip Papadopoulos. Other initial members will be from KISTI, TITECH, TACC, CAS, NCHPC, APAC and Singapore.

The initiators envision a series of workshops (right now 3 in 2002, 1 in 2003, 1 in 2004 planned, to address such issues as:

Cluster computing

Federating databases

Grid portals

Knowledge integration in various domains

Mirroring databases in biology

Telemicroscopy

Network engineering and operations

Measurement and analysis of grid performance

Impact of wireless on expanding the range of the grid

The time is ripe to launch this initiative to bring together researchers, scientists and technical experts to build tools for applications to run on the growing grid environment. The plan we have proposed with leverage the other activities around the globe, will focus on and contribute to key scientific applications, ensures on-going dialog, and thereby build through these and associated interactions sustainable collaborations in the Pacific Rim arena. Through these collaborations, we will be able to address larger problems of global concern, and build the necessary human infrastructure and networks, the ultimate science infrastructure.