GOVERNMENT
SC Global at SC2001: A Brief Interview with the Chair and Vice-Chair
By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief -- At every SC show there are multitudes of fascinating and often amazing things going on. This year’s show was no exception. One of the best examples is SC Global, the first global grid initiative to bring the world to the premiere technical and industrial meeting for high performance computing and networking. To see how this industry-first went, Supercomputing Online sat down with SC Global Chairman and Vice Chairman Ian Foster and Terry Disz, both of Argonne National Laboratory.
Supercomputing: Gentlemen, thank you for the interview. How’s your show been thus far? FOSTER: SC Global has been a great success in terms of forming these connections. There have been a few technical ups and downs in terms of getting, not every session has gone flawlessly, but I think it’s been generally viewed as a big success. DISZ: Yes, I think so. The feedback from the remote sites, they think this was a great event and we enjoyed being able to receive program content because we’ve been broadcasting…One of the SC technical programs we’ve been sending that content out. So we’re involved with all these high performance computing centers and they just think it’s great that they can do this. Supercomputing: This was sort of the maiden voyage for SC Global and it sounds like everything went very well. Am I correct in the assumption we’ll have something similar at next year’s show? FOSTER: Yes. So clearly this network of access grid nodes, networks and people are going to continue so next week we’ll probably be talking to some of these people doing things. Something like this will happen at next year’s conference, but I guess that’s up to next year’s program chair. DISZ: What I think is going to happen because of the satellite conferences will expand . In Manchester there’s actually two nodes. There’s one at the Imperial College of London and they’re heading a consortium of eight universities. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t want satellite programs next year. Supercomputing: What do you feel was the most significant thing to come out of SC Global? SC2001 on the whole? FOSTER: SC2001 was maybe the first conference in which grid technologies sort of were at the forefront. So SC Global was part of that, the use of access grids. When you link these globally…if you go around the show floor there’s industrial and of course research booths showing off grid technologies. We had our announcement Monday of 12 companies providing commercial support for the Globus Toolkit which we were very pleased about. I think that’s the one thing that was significant about this year. And certainly SC Global was a big part of that. Supercomputing: I caught the RAGE (remote access grid entity) demo on Monday night. That little thing is great. DISZ: Berkeley is where some of the tools we use were invented some years ago. They’ve got a long history of audio, video technology over the Internet. One of the things they wanted to address was the basic access grid requirements were quite a bit of equipment and bandwidth and room and things like that. They were searching for a lower bandwidth, mobile version of this whole thing. That was the motivation for the robot. It still uses all the protocols, interfaces, the access grid uses but it’s in a smaller package. It’s really a prototype for field deployment of this sort of thing and I think it’s great. Supercomputing: Anything you’d like to add? FOSTER: I think SC is a great conference and we see it keeps evolving with the times. I think the bar goes a little higher every year. It’s not just about better numerical methods or supercomputers anymore, it’s about high performance networking and computing and techniques, all aspects of what it means to do advanced science and engineering. ---------- Supercomputing Online wishes to thank Ian Foster & Terry Disz for their time and insights. ----------
Supercomputing: Gentlemen, thank you for the interview. How’s your show been thus far? FOSTER: SC Global has been a great success in terms of forming these connections. There have been a few technical ups and downs in terms of getting, not every session has gone flawlessly, but I think it’s been generally viewed as a big success. DISZ: Yes, I think so. The feedback from the remote sites, they think this was a great event and we enjoyed being able to receive program content because we’ve been broadcasting…One of the SC technical programs we’ve been sending that content out. So we’re involved with all these high performance computing centers and they just think it’s great that they can do this. Supercomputing: This was sort of the maiden voyage for SC Global and it sounds like everything went very well. Am I correct in the assumption we’ll have something similar at next year’s show? FOSTER: Yes. So clearly this network of access grid nodes, networks and people are going to continue so next week we’ll probably be talking to some of these people doing things. Something like this will happen at next year’s conference, but I guess that’s up to next year’s program chair. DISZ: What I think is going to happen because of the satellite conferences will expand . In Manchester there’s actually two nodes. There’s one at the Imperial College of London and they’re heading a consortium of eight universities. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t want satellite programs next year. Supercomputing: What do you feel was the most significant thing to come out of SC Global? SC2001 on the whole? FOSTER: SC2001 was maybe the first conference in which grid technologies sort of were at the forefront. So SC Global was part of that, the use of access grids. When you link these globally…if you go around the show floor there’s industrial and of course research booths showing off grid technologies. We had our announcement Monday of 12 companies providing commercial support for the Globus Toolkit which we were very pleased about. I think that’s the one thing that was significant about this year. And certainly SC Global was a big part of that. Supercomputing: I caught the RAGE (remote access grid entity) demo on Monday night. That little thing is great. DISZ: Berkeley is where some of the tools we use were invented some years ago. They’ve got a long history of audio, video technology over the Internet. One of the things they wanted to address was the basic access grid requirements were quite a bit of equipment and bandwidth and room and things like that. They were searching for a lower bandwidth, mobile version of this whole thing. That was the motivation for the robot. It still uses all the protocols, interfaces, the access grid uses but it’s in a smaller package. It’s really a prototype for field deployment of this sort of thing and I think it’s great. Supercomputing: Anything you’d like to add? FOSTER: I think SC is a great conference and we see it keeps evolving with the times. I think the bar goes a little higher every year. It’s not just about better numerical methods or supercomputers anymore, it’s about high performance networking and computing and techniques, all aspects of what it means to do advanced science and engineering. ---------- Supercomputing Online wishes to thank Ian Foster & Terry Disz for their time and insights. ----------
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