The AMC and BiGGrid invite you to attend a very interesting talk next week at the Science Park:

A Fresh Perspective on Distributed Scientific Applications and Cyberinfrastructure by Shantenu Jha

see more details below.

Date: 21 Sept Time: 15-16h Place: NIKHEF, room H331 (route: http://www.nikhef.nl/en/about-nikhef/contact/how-to-reach-nikhef/)

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A Fresh Perspective on Distributed Scientific Applications and Cyberinfrastructure

It is generally accepted that the ability to develop large-scale distributed applications that are extensible and independent of infrastructure details has lagged seriously behind other advances in cyberinfrastructure. Even accounting for the fact that developing applications for distributed infrastructure is a difficult undertaking, there are suspiciously few novel and extensible distributed applications that utilize multiple production distributed resources. The reasons are complex and defy over-simplication. As the sophistication and scale of distributed infrastructure increases, the complexity of successfully developing and executing such applications will increase in both quantitatively and in qualitatively newer ways. Against this backdrop, we will introduce the IDEAS design objectives -- Interoperabiltiy, Distributed Scale-out, Extensibilty, Adaptivity and Simplicity, for developing distributed applications. We then briefly outline SAGA -- which provides a simple, high-level POSIX-inspired API to the most commonly required distributed functionality independent of the underlying distributed environment details. We will discuss how SAGA facilitates the development of applications that can adhere to the IDEAS objectives. Finally, we will highlight several examples of how SAGA, and simple extensible abstractions built using SAGA, have been used by a range of different applications, tools and frameworks to effectively develop and execute distributed applications on a variety of distributed infrastructure, and thus provide a fresh perspective to developing distributed applications by addressing many limitations of the traditional modes of development.

Shantenu Jha is the Director for Cyberinfrastructure Development at the CCT, and a Research Professor in Computer Science at Louisiana State University (LSU). He is also a theme-leader at the e-Science Institute, Edinburgh and a Visiting Researcher at UC-London. His research interests lie at the triple point of Computer Science, Cyberinfrastructure Development and Computational Science. He is a co-PI for $2.6M NSF award that enables LSU/LONI participation as a TeraGrid Resource Provider. Shantenu leads the SAGA project and is currently working on co-writing a book on "Abstractions for Distributed Applications and Systems: A Computational Science Perspective" to be published by Wiley in 2010.