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The conference opened with a keynote by Ed Seidel from LSU. He
started out by laying out the vision for the grid: an environment of
virtualization for transparent access to resources.
He made an interesting point about the growth of network bandwidth
versus the growth of computation power. Computing power has been
doubling every 18 months, but network capacity has been doubling every
9 months. The bandwidth rapidly outstrips the the computational
increases to the point where bandwidth effectively becomes
infinite. While latency will always be a consideration, we should
design our applications from the perspective of having access to as
much data as we want in the latency window. We should concentrate on
the types of applications this reality makes possible.
He noted that networks are not saturated today because people simply
aren't trying different approaches because the bandwidth is
restricted. The bandwidth needs to be opened up and the artificial
restrictions removed in order to encourage the emergence of these new
applications.
In order to manage the complexity of modern simulations it's
desirable to build a web portal for the application interface so that
all complexity can be hidden. The user simply has to click on a web
page to initiate the simulation.
It's basically a _good_time_to_get_organized_ and take advantage of the
new applications and new ways to work.. Develop regional networks.
Build new applications. The environments are maturing and the tools to
leverage them are emerging.
He offered some insight on building communities. When ever an effort
is attempted one of the early questions is about money and how to fund
the effort. He suggested not to worry about this initial. Simply
work on getting something going through the efforts of interested
parties. Their early cactus worm was just a proof of concept
where the app runs a while writes a checkpoint and allows the user to
track and steer the apps. It was just a hack, no external services,
just used ssh, but it motivated new toolkits. This lead to the
creation of the GridLab community which has grown to a $7M Euro
project.
