1. 3 Questions for Cluster and Grid Use
Asheville North Carolina
September
Geoffrey Fox
Computer Science, Informatics, Physics
Pervasive Technology Laboratories
Indiana University Bloomington IN 47401

2. Is the work and activities of Global Grid Form (GGF/OGF) of any value to CCGSC Community?
Currently OGF is meeting (September 11-14) with
Development of standards
Varied collection of “forums” including workshops – it now has a specific eScience “function” (also Standards and Enterprise functions)
For example, OGF19 (North Carolina Jan 29 – Feb 2) one day workshops
Web 2.0 and the Grid
Federated Identity in Grids and (Virtual) Organizations
Currently very few OGF standards used but many W3C, OASIS standards are also not used
Mashups are composed from JavaScript, AJAX and REST and not BPEL WSDL and SOAP ( APIs 1000 Mashups)
GridFTP popular (BitTorrent more popular); BES (Basic Execution Services) with JSDL (Job Specification Language) likely to be popular
“Standardly” available software like GT4 Condor and SRB are used
Wide use of standards should help users as allows more sustainable software with multiple interoperating “vendors”
Could OGF activities be tweaked/redirected to be of more value?
Measurement: Number of OGF Standards used in real Grids
Measurement: Number of (eScience) attendees at OGF meetings

3. Can we survive/make use of innovative multicore programming models I?
Multicore chips will generate programming models that are optimized for use in “broad applications” (aka “Microsoft Word”) and scaling up to eventually to some 128 cores
Fast thread switching operations with microsecond latency
It is unlikely that openMP and MPI will be dominant “broad programming” models as these optimized for different criteria
ParalleX (LSU), Software Transactional Memory STM, Microsoft’s Concurrency and Coordination Runtime CCR, and Functional Languages are approaches that have pretty different concurrency models from MPI/openMP
Don’t know how CCA and HPCS Languages sit with respect to multicore and its application base
One will get far-out “broad programming models” as well as those aimed at evolution over next 5-10 years

4. Can we survive/make use of innovative multicore programming models II?
Are these new models a distraction or an opportunity for scientific computing?
Can we / Should we produce a new generation of hybrid programming models that say span MPI to CCR?
Could open up applications that didn’t work so well on traditional clusters/programming models
Discrete event simulation with Time Warp etc. is one example
Tree algorithms like Branch&Bound and Computer Chess will run well
Measurements:
Number of new applications enabled by multicore
Number of applications using “new” programming models
Performance of “new” programming models (and their run time)

5. Do we need more expertise/ education/ consultants in parallel/concurrent computing?
There is a plethora of students with Grid and Internet technology skills
Few computer Science students (at Indiana) take more than an optional introductory parallel computing class
Application scientists are using parallel computers (clusters) but in my experience often use rather inefficient naïve algorithms
e.g. O(N2) not O(NlogN) algorithms
e.g. misuse of MPI collective communications
Probably DoE has plenty of experts
Do we need more students and more classes taught by more faculty?
Do we need more “consultants”
Measurements:
Quality of Code produced by “new” users
Number of Students graduating per year in various parts (CS and applications) of parallel computing