[lug] [OT] Boulder ACM Meeting Announcement - April 25, 2002
Michael Deck
deckm at cleansoft.com
Fri Mar 29 13:38:39 MST 2002
MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT
We are pleased to announce the April 2002 meeting of the
Boulder Chapter of the ACM. Please pass this invitation along to
others who might also be interested.
Topic: Future Directions in Grids for Science
Speaker: Paul Messina, Sr. Scientist, Argonne Nat'l Lab & U. of Chicago
Date: Thursday, April 25, 2002
Time: 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Place: University of Colorado, Boulder
Engineering Center ECCR-150
Meet-The-Speaker Dinner, 6:00pm (Details Below)
Abstract:
The Grid is a powerful concept that is providing a unifying principle for
many activities in -- and infrastructure plans for -- computational science
and engineering.
The Grid is a premier example of applications-driven research and
development that are inspired by the confluence of several trends,
including the emergence of fast and affordable wide-area networks, large data
archives, software and hardware interfaces, and visualization technologies.
The earliest Grid projects started in the early 1990s. By the late 1990s,
the confluence of these trends and advances led to the initiation of
projects that could only be done on the Grid or ones that reap major
benefits from Grid approaches. Among those are the Digital Sky, which led to
Virtual Observatory projects and the EU Data Grid. Work on the software
components that implement the Grid concept -- usually called middleware --
accelerated as the new applications became operational and revealed
shortcomings or missing functionality. There are now major Grid projects
underway in many countries.
The creation and analysis of large scientific data collections are a major
driver for Grids. Dramatic improvements in the cost-performance and
reliability of disks have enabled even small research groups to keep many
terabytes of data on-line. Sensor technology has advanced as well and
scientists are gathering more and more data. Gaining access to the huge
data collections that are being assembled and curated by many disciplines
has become a major driver for the use of Grids. Unlike computing power,
such data archives are not so readily replicated at each user site, hence
they must be accessed remotely. Further, multidisciplinary investigations
often require the simultaneous access of several data collections, each of
which is in a different location. Finally, the analysis of the data can
require powerful computer systems that are in another location and the
visualization of the results of the analysis might require the use of a
system at yet another site.
This talk will introduce the concept of Grids and the middleware that is
used to create them and describe a number of grid projects worldwide, with
an emphasis on the applications that are being targeted for Grids.
Links:
[http://www.mkp.com/grids]
[http://www.npaci.edu/envision/v15.3/digitalsky.html]
[http://us-vo.org/]
[http://www.eso.org/projects/avo/]
[http://www.eu-datagrid.org/]
About the Speaker
Paul Messina has recently retired from the California Institute of
Technology and is now a Senior Scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory
and the University of Chicago.
He was the Assistant Vice President for Scientific Computing at the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he also held the
positions of Faculty Associate in Scientific Computing and Director of
Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research. During a leave from
Caltech from January 1999 to December 2000, he was Director of the Office
of Advanced Simulation and Computing for Defense Programs in the National
Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy. In that capacity he
had responsibility for managing the Accelerated Strategic Computing
Initiative, the world's largest scientific computing program, which is
defining the state of the art in that field. He holds the position of Chief
Architect for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (NPACI), a partnership established by the National Science
Foundation and led by the University of California, San Diego. His recent
interests focus on advanced computer architectures, especially their
application to large-scale computations in science and engineering. He has
also been active in high-speed networks, computer performance evaluation,
and Petaflops computing issues. Prior to his assignment in DOE, he led the
Computational and Computer Science component of Caltech's research project
funded by the Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASAP) of the
Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). In the mid 1990s he
established and led the Scalable I/O Initiative (SIO), a large scale-effort
to address input/output scalability issues in large-scale computing; the
SIO had over 15 participating institutions. In the early 1990s he was the
Principal Investigator and project manager of the CASA gigabit network
testbed. During that period he also conceived, formed, and led the
Consortium for Concurrent Supercomputing, whose thirteen members included
several Federal agencies, National Laboratories, universities, and
industry. That Consortium created and operated the Intel Touchstone Delta
System, which was the world's most powerful scientific computer for two
years. He also held a joint appointment at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as
manager of High-Performance Computing and Communications from 1988 to 1998.
Messina is associate editor of the journal Concurrency: Practice and
Experience and on the editorial Board of the IEEE Journal Computing in
Science and Engineering. He has been keynote speaker at a number of
international conferences, including the 1999 International Meshing
Roundtable, the 1997 SIAM Annual Meeting, the 1997 Mannheim Symposium, the
1996 ICPP Workshop on Challenges for Parallel Processing, HPCN Europe '95,
Supercomputing Japan '92, the 1993 High Performance Distributed Computing 2
Conference in Spokane, WA, and the 1991 IMA Conference on Parallel
Computation, Oxford, England.
Messina received his PhD in mathematics in 1972 and his MS in applied
mathematics in 1967, both from the University of Cincinnati, and his BA in
mathematics in 1965 from the College of Wooster. He is a member of the IEEE
Computer Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
ACM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and Sigma Xi. He
is co-author of four books on scientific computing and editor of more than
a dozen others.
In 2001 he received the U.S. Department of Energy's Distinguished Associate
Award, the highest award that the department awards to individuals who are
not Federal employees. In 1997 he was awarded an honorary degree in
Computer Engineering by the University of Lecce, Italy, in recognition of
his contributions to computational science. In 1993 he was awarded a plaque
by the IEEE High-Performance Distributed Computing Conference for
pioneering contributions to the field. In 1992 he received Federal Computer
Week's ``Federal 100 Award'' for spearheading the acquisition of the Intel
Touchstone Delta and overcoming politics and interagency rivalries in
creating the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium. FCW gives this award
each year to recognize people from academia, government, and industry "who
have made a difference in the Federal systems community."
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Meet the Speaker
----------------------------------------------
We invite you to have dinner with the speaker and colleagues at the
May Wah Chinese restaurant, in the BaseMar shopping center at the
corner of Baseline and Broadway in Boulder. You'll pay for your own
meal, but the conversation is worth it. So that we reserve a
large enough table, we ask that you confirm your attendance by noon on
Wednesday, April 24th via email to deckm at cleansoft.com. Dinner begins at
6:00pm and ends at 7:00pm so that we can drive the short distance to CU.
PLEASE RSVP FOR DINNER! The last few meetings, we've had reservations
from only a small fraction of the eventual attendees, and it's hard on us
and the restaurant!!!
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Directions
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(These directions begin from the intersection of US 36 and
Baseline Rd. in Boulder. One way to get there is take I-25 to US
36 and then US 36 North. If you are coming from the north, you'd
probably be better off coming in on US 285 south to Baseline.)
Part 1: US36/Baseline to Regent Drive Autopark
North on US36 about 1/2 mile to Colorado Blvd.
Left (West) on Colorado Blvd. first light is Regent Dr.
Left (South) on Regent Dr. to parking structure on left.
Parking is usually free in the structure itself after hours.
There are other lots around as well as meters on Regent. There
is a parking lot South of the parking garage with metered
parking; parking is free in many lots after 5:00pm. Be sure
to check signs wherever you park.
Part 2: Regent Drive Autopark to Engineering Building (on foot)
After leaving the garage, cross Regent Dr. going West. The
Engineering Center (EC) is the gray concrete building with all
the tile roofs at different levels. Proceed on foot past an
open field on your left and then past the Business School
also on your left. You will come out onto a tree-lined
pedestrian boulevard that runs north/south. The EC is now on
your right.
Turn right (north) and walk about 300 feet.
Turn right (east) into the main EC entrance. Proceed through
the revolving doors into the EC.
Turn right and proceed down the corridor into the
Classroom (CR) section. The room numbers should all be
ECCR-1xx or CR-1xx. If not, you're lost and you need to get
someone to help you.
Turn right once you get into the CR wing and look for this month's room.
The CR section has about 50 rooms arranged in a rough square.
You may have to turn left a few times before you come
to the room.
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The Boulder Chapter of the ACM is a local professional chapter of the
Association for Computing Machinery, an international organization of
computer practitioners and researchers.
The mission of the Boulder Chapter is to promote the exchange of
information and ideas to increase the effectiveness of the Boulder area
computing community.
The chapter is a non-profit, educational organization that serves the
Boulder, Denver and northern Colorado Front Range area.
The chapter holds regular meetings for informal information exchange.
Meetings are usually the fourth Tuesday of the month. Members and
non-members are welcome to attend. For information about the chapter,
or to be placed on our mailing list, see our web page at
www.acm-boulder.org/
Once or twice a year we present a professional development seminar
(PDS), usually a tutorial by a recognized expert in a particular
aspect of computing. Both of these offerings are intended to help
computer professionals learn about developments outside of their specialty.
Michael Deck
Cleanroom Software Engineering, Inc.
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