ITWales.com
John Oliver, WeSC Commercial Coordinator
The Welsh e-Science Centre (WeSC) based at Cardiff University is the Welsh node of the UK e-Science Programme. Its role is to promote e-Science research and development in Wales and South
West England, and to accelerate adoption of e-Science and Grid capabilities among academia and industry.
e-Science is defined as science increasingly done through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet, using very large data collections, tera-scale computing resources and high
performance visualization. It allows for scientists and researchers all over the world to collaborate in real-time, using shared resources, and it is facilitated in part by Grid computing - viewed by many as
an engine for economic progress and social change driven by a confluence of technologies.
Basheera Khan talks to John Oliver, WeSC Commercial Coordinator, about e-Science, the Welsh Centre, and the potential of Grid computing.
BK:
There are three clearly defined aspects to the work that WeSC is doing: the Access Grid, which encourages collaboration between research facilities across the world; Grid computing services,
which allow researchers in private or public sector to hire time on the Grid to harness its massive computational power; and the Distributed Visualization Facility (DVF), which is an advanced immersive
visualization system for grid-based computing. How is WeSC using the Access Grid at the moment?
JO:
At the moment it's being used within the academic community and it's used within the UK science community. We are one of eight e-Science Centres in the UK and we're the Centre for Wales, so the
Access Grid is used by the UK science community to work together in a collaborative way. An example of that is the UK Grid Engineering Task Force which is raising the levels of grid middleware -
there are representatives of the task force in every e-Science Centre in the UK. They meet on a regular basis and they use the Access Grid to hold their meetings and so of course they don't have to
travel to any single Centre.
Following on from that there are other schools within Cardiff University which are becoming aware of what we have here and have asked if they can make use of it to collaborate with their colleagues in
other Centres or universities. We are also starting to use the Access Grid to collaborate with our industrial partners. The third stage would be to see if we could use or perhaps deploy the Access Grid in
the commercial sector.
BK: How does this differ from the Welsh Video Network, where video conferencing facilities are already available to all Further Education and Higher Education Institutions throughout Wales?
JO:
The difference is that the Access Grid uses the Internet to communicate, and it's constructed from standard components that you can easily buy, such as digital projectors, PCs, web cams and that
kind of thing. It runs on software that's in the public domain - there's no specialist technology required for it.
BK: So, the level of entry then is very low but people who want to come down and make use of it for industrial collaboration can reap far greater benefits. It must be very attractive prospect for
commercial companies?
JO:
Yes, there are a number of companies that have their own private Grid which they are using for specific types of work, particularly where they've got computing resources distributed around the world
and they are looking to optimise the use of them. They may have equipment in different places which is under used and other equipment which is over used and if you can connect the resources over
a Grid you can share the work around and optimise the resources that you already have. We're able to do that with the UK e-Science grid because we have resources here at Cardiff, all the other
Centres have resources, they are all Grid networked together. So work can be done at Cardiff but if there are additional resources required they can be obtained from one of the other Centres.
BK: What are the other aspects of WeSC's work?
JO
: The aim is to promote e-Science research and development in Wales and some parts of South West England, and to encourage the exploitation of Grid computing. We're doing this with partners in
industry and academia, and some of these collaborations involve several partners.
The GECEM (Grid-enabled Computational Electromagnetics) collaboration, for instance, involves ourselves, BAE systems, Swansea University and the Institute of High Performance Computing in
Singapore, so it's got an international dimension to it as well.
Our other objective is to pursue research focusing in three areas: data and knowledge management, interoperating heterogeneous distributed information resources (that's the kind of information that's
all over the place in different formats), and the problem solving environment.
Really the problem solving environment is like a workbench with a set of tools to work on problems of a particular order, so that you can pull these things together all in one area and it's the way of doing
science now. The third thing is Distributed Visualisation - that's for immersive and collaborative applications, to be able to look at images in two and three dimensions in a distributed form. If somebody
has a piece of research which has a graphical output and they want to discuss it with a colleague it can be brought up on screen in a meeting.
For example, the SARS Grid in Taiwan was set up in a short time frame to allow different medical institutions in Taiwan to battle the SARS epidemic. This was crisis management on a national scale,
enabled by the Grid. These people were all quarantined and couldn't move about, and the SARS Grid allowed the medics to tackle this problem and share information about patients, about climate
conditions, about all the different criteria that would affect the spread of SARS, and also to be able to do some analysis of various possible scenarios and plan a campaign of action to tackle the
disease.
BK: What projects does WeSC have underway in terms of its R&D objective?
JO:
Within the e-Science Centre there are 40 people who are actively involved in research in e-Science and Grid Computing. There's GECEM, which I've mentioned before, and RAVE - Resource Aware
Visualization Environment. The idea is that when you want to visualise data outputs, in order to actually visualise that on a piece of equipment that you have to be rendered which is a very computing
resource intensive action. RAVE allows you to find a resource to do it; the information is rendered graphically and sent back in a form that's appropriate for the client (i.e. the hardware platform that
you're viewing the graphic on) and when you set up a session there may be several clients looking at the same session with anything from a PC to a laptop down to a PDA.
Biodiversity World is another project that has been going for a couple of years. It's an e-Science pilot project which involves the Universities of Reading, Cardiff and Southampton in collaboration with
the Natural History Museum. It is working on creating a 'problem solving virtual laboratory' in which scientists can access data and tools to understand and monitor biodiversity. The project has to link
together existing tool sets and data collection with new tool sets and data - this makes it well suited for e-Science because the power of the Grid is needed in some of its simulations of climate while it
also needs to link information held at distributed sites in a large variety of formats.
There's also Triana, which is a visual workflow tool, which was developed from a stand alone situation to a way of actually linking together web services and Grid services, the idea being that instead of
running IT in-house there are certain services you want that would be available by the web or the Grid and you would push the work out into that service and pull it back again.
An analogy might be in producing a newsletter using a service orientated approach. Say it's a weekly newsletter, it's going to contain text images and an address, and needs to be produced in 3
different languages and delivered in 2 ways - e-mail and snail mail. You've got a number of different services that you might use to do this; the customer is producing the text and images, and there's an
address list for people who are going to receive it, with two types of address: postal and e-mail.
The first service is to actually translate the English text into Welsh and French and you might use a particular company that does both, or the services of two different companies. Once you've got the
three versions of the text, you need to compose the newsletter, possibly using a template so it would be in standard format. There'd be two types of composition, one for e-mail and one for a leaflet
format. So you're left with six products or outputs. These would go to a third service for distribution. And you could choose to do this all in-house at greater cost, or outsource it for cost savings. There's
a similar sort of model in using Grid services.
BK: WeSC is funded by the DTI, the WDA and Cardiff University, and it is in year three of its funding. What are the plans for sustainability once the five-year funding budget has come to an
end?
JO:
We're looking to form collaborations with industrial partners with a view to taking pieces of work and turning them into products - where we can generate our own revenue by licensing pieces of work,
or generate revenue through whatever kind of agreement we can strike with the partner. So we're looking to increase the number of industrial products and projects and to develop things into products.
BK: The WeSC has many potential opportunities to involve private sector companies in its research and development; in fact, there are a few multinational companies already on board. Will
WeSC be considering collaboration with companies within the Technium network as well?
JO:
At the moment, yes. I've been talking to Emma Venables, marketing manager at Technium I. We're going to be briefing the various people involved, but it is a case, to begin with, of getting the people
who run the Technium network to understand the benefits. I think we have to start from there. I think that @Wales [the digital media incubator based in Cardiff Bay -ed] does, and some of the
companies have already approached us. The various Techniums within the Technium network are in different stages of development, so I'm looking to engage with the Technium management to begin
with.
Useful Links
Welsh e-Science Centre:
http://www.wesc.ac.uk/
UK Grid Engineering Task Force:
http://tyne.dl.ac.uk/ETF/index.shtml
Cardiff University:
http://www.cf.ac.uk/
Basheera Khan is a freelance IT journalist. Feedback on the article can be directed via: editor@itwales.com
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