Enabling scientific collaboration on the Grid
Future Generation Computer Systems
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The Internet was the inspiration of J.C.R.Licklider when he was at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960's. In those pre-Moore's Law days, Licklider imagined a future in which researchers could access and use computers and data from anywhere in the world. Today, as everyone knows, the killer applications for the Internet were email in the 1970's and the World Wide Web in the 1990's which was developed initially as a collaboration tool for the particle physics academic community. In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. In the context of science and engineering, this is the 'e-Science' agenda. Robust middleware services deployed on top of research networks will constitute a powerful 'Cyberinfrastructure' for collaborative science and engineering.This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe the present status of efforts to build such an internet-scale distributed infrastructure based on Web Services. The goal is to provide robust middleware components that will allow scientists and engineers to routinely construct the inter-organizational 'Virtual Organizations'. Given the present state of Web Services, we argue for the need to define such Virtual Organization 'Grid' services on well-established Web Service specifications that are widely supported by the IT industry. Only industry can provide the necessary tooling and development environments to enable widespread adoption of such Grid services. Extensions to these basic Grid services can be added as more Web Services mature and the research community has had the opportunity to experiment with new services providing potentially useful new functionalities. The new Cyberinfrastructure will be of relevance to more than just the research community: it will impact both the e-learning and digital library communities allow the creation of scientific 'mash-ups' of services giving significant added value.