ENGINEERING

PALO ALTO, CA -- Researchers from across the United States gathered in Palo Alto, California, December 4-5 for NASA’s third annual Information Power Grid (IPG) workshop to discuss the current state of the geographically distributed computational network. More than 100 computer scientists from academic institutions, government labs, and NASA centers were in attendance to learn about the recent developments in grid technology. Thirty scientists presented the state of their research and the development progress of IPG infrastructure components during the workshop. Peer feedback, problem solving, and networking enabled researchers to address problems encountered in developing new Web tools and applications for the IPG. Kicking off the two-day event, NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division Chief Bill Feiereisen emphasized the importance of collaboration. “I think it is important to realize that even though this is NASA’s IPG workshop, the IPG is part of an entire grid effort throughout the United States, throughout Europe, and throughout the Asian Pacific Rim — I want to make it really evident that we are doing this all together. Many levels of many different organizations are working toward the same goal of merging efforts into a single grid.” Although presenters were from different institutions, reporting on different topics, there was a central theme and direction to all presentations. “It’s pretty clear that the area of Web services is going to be the hot topic this year in grids. There was quite a bit of discussion in all of the talks about what Web services are,” explains NAS Division IPG Task Lead Tony Lisotta. In the presentation, “Peer to Peer Networks and Web Services for a Community Grid,” IPG collaborator Geoffrey Fox from Indiana University discussed the need to define interfaces of web applications to facilitate computer-to-computer interactions. Another presentation delivered by George Myers from NASA Ames Research Center outlined the recent developments of IPG’s LaunchPad, a Web portal created to enable grid users to submit jobs to IPG resources via any Web browser. NASA Glenn’s Robert Griffin also discussed interactive online job submission for monitoring and modeling aircraft through the Aviation Safety Program. Not only was work presented on grid efforts by current participants of the IPG, but a new collaboration was formed at the workshop between NASA’s IPG and the National Virtual Observatory (NVO) project. The NVO project aims to make available to the individual astronomer images of the night sky captured with powerful telescopes. In addition, they would like to be able to provide high-powered computational resources necessary to process the data. This sort of collaboration is what enables the IPG to grow and expand its capabilities. “I thought the workshop was extremely successful. We had good participation from the general grid community this year, and I hope to see more applications people at future workshops,” says NAS Senior Scientist, Tom Hinke.