1. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Introducing Research Grids and e-Science – whats in it for the Humanities? Dr Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN DRH2003 University of Gloucestershire

2. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Overview Setting the context - a little bit of history The UK e-Science Programme Research – some common challenges Whats happening now? Opportunities…..

3. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Grid computing refers to the large-scale integration of computer systems via high speed networks to provide on-demand access to data-crunching capabilities and functions not available to one individual or group of machines Ian Foster, Scientific American April 2003

4. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Grid technology enables large-scale scientific and business collaboration among members of virtual organizations, remote experimentation and high-performance distributed computing and data analysis Ian Foster, Scientific American April 2003

5. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk The Grid 1967 – 2003 Part 1 With acknowledgement to Rob Baxter (NeSC) 1967 Worlds first packet-switched network 1973 Ethernet demo at Xerox PARC 1976 First Cray-1 super-computer 1984 JANet built 1988 Condor project begins – earliest cycle scavenger or scheduler – ideal tool for Grid?? 1991 WWW created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN 1993 Legion project launch – used Grid Object model 1994 Nimrod project launch – co-ordinates tasks across a network 1997 UNICORE project starts – combined toolkit and portal model 1997 Storage Resource Broker v1.0 – client server middleware connecting to heterogeneous datasets based on attributes 1998 The GRID book – Foster & Kesselman

6. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk The Grid 1967 – 2003 Part 2 1998 Globus v1.0.0 – the leading Grid toolkit –Defines standards for security, resource discovery, data access & transfer, remote job execution –Layered architecture –Single sign-on 2001 March Global Grid Forum 1 2001 March Web Services IBM – provided a sea-change in Grid thinking 2001 July UK e-Science Programme Phase 1 launch 2001 November GEANT activated – pan-European gigabit network 2002 February OGSA–DAI (Open Grid Services Architecture-Data Access & Integration) project launched – UK Grid Core Programme with DTI, IBM, Oracle partners, a marriage of Globus and Web Services 2003 March Open Grid Services Infrastructure OGSI V1.0 spec 2003 July UK e-Science Programme Phase 2 planning 2003 September 2 nd All Hands meeting in Nottingham tomorrow…….

7. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk UK e-Science Programme e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it. Dr John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils

8. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk UK e-Science Programme Phase 1 2001 - 2004 Professor Tony Hey, Director Government funds from OST and DTI + industry matching £74M application projects £35M Core Programme (CP) CP managed by EPSRC for Research Councils To advance the development of robust and generic Grid middleware in collaboration with industry http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/

9. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Cambridge Newcastle Edinburgh Oxford Glasgow Manchester Cardiff Soton London Belfast DL RL Hinxton Lancaster Social Sciences White Rose Birmingham/Warwick Modelling Bristol Media UCL UK e-Science Grid & Centres of Excellence With acknowledgement to Tony Hey

10. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Powering the Virtual Universe http://www.astrogrid.ac.uk (Edinburgh, Belfast, Cambridge, Leicester, London, Manchester, RAL) Multi-wavelength showing the jet in M87: from top to bottom – Chandra X-ray, HST optical, Gemini mid-IR, VLA radio. AstroGrid will provide advanced, Grid based, federation and data mining tools to facilitate better and faster scientific output. Picture credits: NASA / Chandra X-ray Observatory / Herman Marshall (MIT), NASA/HST/Eric Perlman (UMBC), Gemini Observatory/OSCIR, VLA/NSF/Eric Perlman (UMBC)/Fang Zhou, Biretta (STScI)/F Owen (NRA) :

11. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk myGrid Project Imminent deluge of data Highly heterogeneous Highly complex and inter-related Convergence of data and literature archives Virtual workbench

12. Comb-e-Chem Project X-Ray e-Lab Analysis Properties Properties e-Lab Simulation Video Diffractometer Grid Middleware Structures Database

13. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk What are the common challenges? Research is increasingly data–intensive New approaches require new skills (IT+statistics+domain) Inter-disciplinary e.g. Astro-informatics Collaborative: virtual communities Knowledge-rich infrastructures: development of ontologies, terminology servers Highly distributed resource utilisation – instruments, bibliographic collections, primary data

14. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Resources are used in new ways Spatial change –Federation, aggregation, dis-aggregation, replication, manipulation, linking, annotation, editing/versioning, transformation Knowledge extraction –Analysis (textual, musical, statistical, mathematical, visual, chemical, gene……) –Mining (text, data, structures……) –Modelling (economic, mathematical, biological..) –Presentation (visualisation, rendering….)

15. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk What is happening now? Planning for Core Programme 2 2003-2006 Digital libraries and e-Science –Joint UKOLN / NeSC workshops –Digital Curation Centre call –EPSRC/JISC funded projects such as eBank (with Combechem) see Ariadne article http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/lyon/ http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/lyon/ –National Centre for Text Mining call e-Social Science –Centre of Excellence Lancaster ESRC April 2004 –Awareness & Training Environment JISC August 2003 Humanities ???

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18. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Some possible applications in the humantities? Complex text mining across distributed documents – multi-lingual processing?? Visualisation and modelling of historically linked archaeological sites Real-time retrieval and image analysis of multiple video streams – news and media?? New distributed and collaborative performance scenarios ?????

19. A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk Opportunities for collaboration…….