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Keynotes
Professor Wolfgang Gentzsch, DEISA, Duke, and RENCI
Talk Title: Challenges in Building Sustainable e-Infrastructures
Abstract
High-speed networks transport data at the speed of light, middleware manages distributed computing resources in an intelligent manner, portal technology enable secure, seemless, and remote access to resources, applications, and data, and sophisticated numerical methods approximate the underlying mathematical equations in a highly accurate way. With the convergence of these core technologies into one complex service oriented architecture, we see the rise of large compute and data grids currently being built and deployed by e-Infrastructure initiatives such as DEISA, EGEE, NAREGI, and TERAGRID. While we master most of the technology aspects of these infrastructures, we still face a number of social, mental, cultural, and legal challenges. After a short introduction into the architecture, components, applications and benefits of e-infrastructures, this presentation will elaborate on some of the most obstructive barriers for building these infrastructures and for their wider acceptance. We will then discuss 10 rules which might help in developing sustainable infrastructures for research and industry. Finally, we will look at several important aspects beyond technological issues, such as sharing of resources, sensitive data, grid-enabling applications, open source, liability, licensing, and intellectual property, which can prevent further development and acceptance of this new technology.
Wolfgang Gentzsch is Dissemination Advisor for the DEISA Distributed European Initiative for Supercomputing Applications. He is an adjunct professor of computer science at Duke University in Durham, and a visiting scientist at RENCI Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC Chapel Hill, both in North Carolina. From 2005 to 2007, he was the Chairman of the German D-Grid Initiative. Recently, he was Vice Chair of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group e-IRG; Area Director of Major Grid Projects of the OGF Open Grid Forum Steering Group; and he is a member of the US President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST-NIT). Before, he was Managing Director of MCNC Grid and Data Center Services in North Carolina; Sun's Senior Director of Grid Computing in Menlo Park, CA; President, CEO, and CTO of start-up companies Genias and Gridware, and professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Regensburg, Germany. Wolfgang Gentzsch studied mathematics and physics at the Technical Universities in Aachen and Darmstadt, Germany.