Abstract Facilitating time to discovery by scientists through computing is an idea that has been around for a significant amount of time. Often, however, domain scientists and computer scientists work in parallel rather than in collaboration with one another. It has been a goal of this workshop (the fifth of its kind) to showcase the examples of such collaborations or tools that enable these collaborations to flourish. This editorial provides an overview of papers requested from a sampling of applied scientific collaborations that were presented at the 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The 20th century brought about an "information revolution" which has forever altered the way we work, communicate, and live. In the 21st century, it is hard to imagine working without an increasingly broad array of supporting technologies and the digital data they provide.The care, management, and preservation of this tidal wave of data has become an increasingly important focus for technology, standards, and policy development. How will we be listening to our music in the next 100 years? How will we sustain our personal and federal records? In the next 100 years, storage technologies will advance tens of generations, and the digital collections preserved on up-to- date storage technologies will need to transition through each new generation, and many times over.This panel will discuss the major challenges of digital preservation, a technology and policy "killer app" for ours and the next generations.

The Internet was the inspiration of J.C.R.Licklider when he was at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960's. In those pre-Moore's Law days, Licklider imagined a future in which researchers could access and use computers and data from anywhere in the world. Today, as everyone knows, the killer applications for the Internet were email in the 1970's and the World Wide Web in the 1990's which was developed initially as a collaboration tool for the particle physics academic community. In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. In the context of science and engineering, this is the 'e-Science' agenda. Robust middleware services deployed on top of research networks will constitute a powerful 'Cyberinfrastructure' for collaborative science and engineering.This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe the present status of efforts to build such an internet-scale distributed infrastructure based on Web Services. The goal is to provide robust middleware components that will allow scientists and engineers to routinely construct the inter-organizational 'Virtual Organizations'. Given the present state of Web Services, we argue for the need to define such Virtual Organization 'Grid' services on well-established Web Service specifications that are widely supported by the IT industry. Only industry can provide the necessary tooling and development environments to enable widespread adoption of such Grid services. Extensions to these basic Grid services can be added as more Web Services mature and the research community has had the opportunity to experiment with new services providing potentially useful new functionalities. The new Cyberinfrastructure will be of relevance to more than just the research community: it will impact both the e-learning and digital library communities allow the creation of scientific 'mash-ups' of services giving significant added value.

Abstract The U.K. e‐Science Programme is a £250 million, five‐year initiative which has funded over 100 projects. These application‐led projects are underpinned by an emerging set of core middleware services that allow the coordinated, collaborative use of distributed resources. This set of middleware services runs on top of the research network and beneath the applications we call the ‘Grid’. Grid middleware is currently in transition from pre‐Web Service versions to a new version based on Web Services. Unfortunately, only a very basic set of Web Services embodied in the Web Services Interoperability proposal, WS‐I, are agreed by most IT companies. IBM and others have submitted proposals for Web Services for Grids—the Web Services ResourceFramework and Web Services Notification specifications—to the OASIS organization for standardization. This process could take up to 12 months from March 2004 and the specifications are subject to debate and potentially significant changes. Since several significant U.K. e‐Science projects come to an end before the end of this process, the U.K. needs to develop a strategy that will protect the U.K.'s investment in Grid middleware by informing the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute's (OMII) roadmap and U.K. middleware repository in Southampton. This paper sets out an evolutionary roadmap that will allow us to capture generic middleware components from projects in a form that will facilitate migration or interoperability with the emerging Grid Web Services standards and with ongoing OGSA developments. In this paper we therefore define a set of Web Services specifications, which we call ‘WS‐I+’ to reflect the fact that this is a larger set than currently accepted by WS‐I, that we believe will enable us to achieve the twin goals of capturing these components and facilitating migration to future standards. We believe that the extra Web Services specifications we have included in WS‐I+ are both helpful in building e‐Science Grids and likely to be widely accepted. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract This editorial describes four papers that summarize key Grid technology capabilities to support distributed e‐Science applications. These papers discuss the Condor system supporting computing communities, the OGSA‐DAI service interfaces for databases, the WS‐I+ Grid Service profile and finally WS‐GAF (the Web Service Grid Application Framework). We discuss the confluence of mainstream IT industry development and the very latest science and computer science research and urge the communities to reach consensus rapidly. Agreement on a set of core Web Service standards is essential to allow developers to build Grids and distributed business and science applications with some assurance that their investment will not be obviated by the changing Web Service frameworks. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Performance engineering can be described as a collection of techniques and methodologies whose aim is to provide reliable prediction, measurement and validation of the performance of applications on a variety of computing platforms. This paper reviews techniques for performance estimation and performance engineering developed at the University of Southampton and presents application case studies in task scheduling for engineering meta‐applications, and capacity engineering for a financial transaction processing system. These show that it is important to describe performance in terms of a resource model, and that the choice of models may have to trade accuracy for utility in addressing the operational issues. We then present work from the on‐going EU funded Grid project GRIA, and show how lessons learned from the earlier work have been applied to support a viable business model for Grid service delivery to a specified quality of service level. The key in this case is to accept the limitations of performance estimation methods, and design business models that take these limitations into account rather than attempting to provide hard guarantees over performance. We conclude by identifying some of the key lessons learned in the course of our work over many years and suggest possible directions for future investigations. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This panel will provide a forum for a discussion of important and timely issues surrounding the global deployment of cyberinfrastructure to support science and engineering research activities. Representatives of funding agencies, existing cyberinfrastructure projects, specific technologies and social scientists involved in the evaluation of these technologies will be brought together to address questions about the key obstacles to the operational deployment of cyberinfrastructure, whether or not cyberinfrastructure will improve research, and what the role of the CSCW community is and can or should be in this deployment.

Performance is a critical issue in current massively parallel processors. However, delivery of adequate performance is not automatic and performance evaluation tools are required in order to help the programmer to understand the behaviour of a parallel program. In recent years, a wide variety of tools have been developed for this purpose, including tools for monitoring and evaluating performance and viaualization tools. However, these tools do not provide an abstract representation of performance. Massively parallel processors can generate a huge amount of performance data, and sophisticated methods for representing and displaying these data (e.g. visual and aural) are required. Performance views are not scalable in general and do not represent an abstraction of the performance data. The do-loop-surface display is proposed as an abstract representation of the performance of a particular do-loop in a program. It has been used to improve the performance of a matrix multiply parallel algorithm as well as to understand the behaviour of the following applications: matrix transposition (TRANS1) and fast fourier transform (FFT1) from the Genesis benchmarks, and the kernel of a fluid dynamics package (FIRE). These experiments were performed on a CM-5, a Meiko CS-1 and a PARSYS Supernode. The examples demonstrate that the do-loop-surface display is a useful way to represent performance. It is implemented using AVS (application visualization system), a standard data visualization package.

Abstract The Genesis benchmark suite has been assembled to evaluate the performance of distributed‐memory MIMD systems. The problems selected all have a scientific origin (mostly from physics or theoretical chemistry), and range from synthetic code fragments designed to measure the basic hardware properties of the computer (especially communication and synchronisation overheads), through commonly used library subroutines, to full application codes. This is the second of a series of papers on the Genesis distributed‐memory benchmarks, which were developed under the European ESPRIT research program. Results are presented for the SUPRENUM and iPSC/860 computers when running the following benchmarks: COMMS1 (communications), TRANS1 (matrix transpose), FFT1 (fast Fourier transform) and QCD2 (conjugate gradient kernel). The theoretical predictions are compared with, or fitted to, the measured results, and then used to predict (with due caution) how the performance might scale for larger problems and more processors than were actually available during the benchmarking.

Abstract This is the first of a series of papers on the Genesis distributed‐memory benchmarks, which were developed under the European ESPRIT research program. The benchmarks provide a standard reference Fortran77 uniprocessor version, a distributed memory. MIMD version, and in some cases a Fortran90 version suitable for SIMD computers. The problems selected all have a scientific origin (mostly from physics or theoretical chemistry), and range from synthetic code fragments designed to measure the basic hardware properties of the computer (especially communication and synchronisation overheads), through commonly used library subroutines, to full application codes. This first paper defines the methodology to be used to analyse the benchmark results, and gives an example of a fully analysed application benchmark from General Relativity (GR1). First, suitable absolute performance metrics are carefully defined, then the performance analysis treats the execution time and absolute performance as functions of at least two variables, namely the problem size and the number of proecssors. The theoretical predictions are compared with, or fitted to, the measured results, and then used to predict (with due caution) how the performance might scale for larger problems and more processors than were actually available during the benchmarking. Benchmark measurements are given primarily for the German SUPRENUM computer, but also for the IBM 3083J, Convex C210 and a Parsys Supernode with 32 T800‐20 transputers.

An investigation is made of the relation between the fault tolerance of a multilayer perceptron (MLP) and its redundancy as determined by the number of hidden-layer neurons (x). Damage was introduced by cutting connections. The application studied is the classification of coins according to their acoustic emissions after striking a hard object. Several MLPs were trained by backpropagation to discriminate acoustic emission data from 6 classes of coin. The nets had 259 input nodes, 6 output nodes, and x varying between 5 and 25. In addition, one single-layer network (x=0) was trained. Results show that the single-layer perceptron (SLP)-although able to classify the data with 100% accuracy under fault-free conditions-was far less damage-resistant than any of the MLPs.>

The paper traces the development of large multi-transputer systems for high-performance scientific and engineering computing. After defining what we mean by 'supercomputing' in the context of this paper, the past and present state of transputer supercomputing environments is illustrated by a discussion of three specific projects. These are the Esprit 'SuperNode' project or P1085, the Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer project and the Victor project at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights. The present parallel programming environments available for transputer systems are also briefly reviewed. The paper concludes with a look to the future. Inmos' announced plans for the next generation transputer, code-named H1, are described along with a comparison with the new Intel iWarp chip. We can classify this Intel component as a 'generic' transputer in that it integrates computing elements, memory elements and communication hardware on a single VLSI chip. Both these new components should make for a bright future for supercomputing with transputer-like building blocks.