ACADEMIA

The future development of computer science depends on researchers' ability to conduct consistent, controlled, and repeatable large-scale experiments in large-scale, distributed supercomputing (SC) and networking.

To tackle this challenge, the FutureGrid project, a partnership among Indiana University and national and international partners, helped host the Workshop on Experimental Support for Computer Science during the SC11 conference in November 2011. The workshop brought together many scientists involved in building and operating infrastructures dedicated to supporting computer science experiments.

A new report, "Supporting Experimental Computer Science," distills the discussion from that workshop into a consensus on the state of the field and directions for moving forward. FutureGrid provides infrastructure for experimental computer science and seeks to contribute to the development of experimental culture in computer science via reports such as this.

"This report will be of great interest to scientists and researchers in experimental computer science," said FutureGrid Principal Investigator Geoffrey C. Fox, director of the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center at Indiana University and a professor in the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing. "New custom capabilities and software must be developed. We need to know how to support scientists with these specialized requirements, so they can focus on their experiments instead of worrying about hardware. This report continues the positive and forward-looking discussion at SC11." Fox was one of the FutureGrid authors from four different universities who contributed to the report.

The report sets the stage by describing the experimental culture and existing methodology in computer science. It continues with the properties of the experimental test-beds, whose representatives have participated in the workshop-Grid'5000 in France and FutureGrid and Open Cirrus in the United States—as well as the projects that these test-beds support. And, it describes the layers of experimental infrastructure, followed by profiles of tools and approaches taken by the respective test-beds to provide basic experiment management services and experiment orchestration.

"The report is effectively a reference guide for students on experimental methodology in computer science," said FutureGrid Co-PI Kate Keahey, editor of the report, and a fellow at the Computation Institute at University of Chicago. "It also explains how to turn principle into practice on experimental test-beds such as FutureGrid, Grid'5000, and OpenStack."

To view or download the report, click this link: Supporting Experimental Computer Science

(or copy the URL into your browser: http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/Supporting_Experimental_Computer_Science_final_draft.pdf">http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/Supporting_Experimental_Computer_Science_final_draft.pdf)