Data-Intensive Distributed Systems Laboratory

Ian T. Foster

Senior Scientist & Distinguished Fellow, Math and Computer Science Division (MCS), Argonne National Laboratory

Director, Computation Institute (CI), University of Chicago

Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Computer Science (CS), University of Chicago

Professor, Physical Sciences, University of Chicago 

Slides (PDF)

The notion of science as a service was originally positioned in 2005 as a means of publishing and accessing scientific data and applications through internet accessible services. At that time, researchers were only just grasping the benefits of employing the same service oriented architectures commonly used in other domains. Since this time we have indeed seen a huge uptake in researchers leveraging services to disseminate and share data and applications in fields as diverse as genomics, climate science, and physical sciences. In addition, commercial software as a service (SaaS) products like Google Docs and Gmail are now used by many researchers in everyday activities. The major benefit of a SaaS approach is that researchers are able to invoke applications or access data remotely over the internet without needing to know the inner workings of the service. Our vision of science as a service worked well in a world when computing resources were scarce; when we needed to federate heterogeneous resources and make them accessible to researchers; when different tools and data were provided using different interfaces and representations; and when research problems involved datasets that could be hosted and analyzed on a single computer. In this talk we re-examine our vision of science as a service in a world in which computing resources are now commoditized; researchers are increasingly facing ‘big data’ challenges; cloud providers, such as Amazon, have become viable alternatives to purchasing dedicated infrastructure; and reliable infrastructure for scientific problems is only an API call away. For a longer version of this abstract, click here. 

Dr. Ian Foster is Director of the Computation Institute, a joint institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He is also an Argonne Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow, and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago. He is also involved with both the Open Grid Forum and with the Globus Alliance as an open source strategist. In 2006, he was appointed director of the Computation Institute, a joint project between the University of Chicago, and Argonne. An earlier project, Strand, received the British Computer Society Award for technical innovation. His research resulted in the development of techniques, tools and algorithms for high-performance distributed computing and parallel computing. As a result he is denoted as "the father of the Grid". Foster led research and development of software for the I-WAY wide-area distributed computing experiment, which connected supercomputers, databases and other high-end resources at 17 sites across North America in 1995. His own labs, the Distributed Systems Laboratory is the nexus of the multi-institute Globus Project, a research and development effort that encourages collaborative computing by providing advances necessary for engineering, business and other fields. Furthermore the Computation Institute addresses many of the most challenging computational and communications problems facing Grid implementations today. In 2004, he founded Univa Corporation, which was merged with United Devices in 2007 and operate under the name Univa UD. Foster's honors include the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society, the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing (2001), as well as others. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. Dr. Foster also serves as PI or Co-PI on projects connected to the DOE global change program, the National Computational Science Alliance, the NASA Information Power Grid project, the NSF Grid Physics Network, GRIDS Center, and International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory projects, and other DOE and NSF programs. His research is supported by DOE, NSF, NASA, Microsoft, and IBM.