Getting the Big Picture: Cyberinfrastructure and its Role in System-Oriented Science

Carl Kesselman
USC - Information Science Institute
April 7th, 2006 Cyberinfrastructure offers the promise of enabling scientific discovery at a scale not otherwise possible. By leveraging these infrastructure advances, it is not only possible to model phenomena with more detail then previously possible, but also to understand the behavior of increasingly more complex systems. For example, in the Southern California Earthquake Center, we combine models for rupture dynamics, fault systems, and wave propagation to determine what surface motion we are likely to see at various points in Southern California. The goal is to not only model the response of the earth, but also to couple it with the bridges and buildings on the surface to create a complete system model of Los Angeles from the perspective of understanding earthquake response. The potential of such systems-oriented science is one of the biggest benefits that cyberinfrastructure can bring. These complex models for system-level science draw on many aspects of our information technology infrastructure, including numerical simulation on high-performance computers, data bases, access to sensor networks, knowledge-based systems, and data mining to name but a few. Hence the issues facing the scientist are more then simply "writing a program" but rather on how components and resources can be flexibly integrated to a computational system that addresses the scientific problem being explored. This flexible integration is one of the primary objectives behind the creation of cyberinfrastructure in general, and the motivation behind Grid infrastructure in particular. In this talk, I will describe the creation of a large-scale cyberinfrastructure and illustrate with the Globus Toolkit, which is a widely deployed Grid infrastructure. I will discuss a range of different applications that are currently leveraging this infrastructure. Finally, I will identify some of the future directions and challenges that remain in order to achieve the potential from systems-level science from the perspective of core computer science research as well as domain-specific advances.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - rielian Hall, Room 203

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes