Services for Science
May 15, 2008
Computational approaches to problem solving have proven their worth in many fields of science, allowing the collection and analysis of
unprecedented quantities of data and the exploration via simulation of previously obscure phenomena. We now face the challenge of scaling the impact of these approaches from the specialist to entire communities. I speak here about work that seeks to address this goal by rethinking
science's information technology foundations in terms of service-oriented architecture. In principle, service-oriented approaches can have a transformative effect on scientific communities, allowing tools formerly accessible only to the specialist to be made available to all, and permitting previously manual data-processing and analysis tasks to be automated. However, while the potential of such "service-oriented science" has been demonstrated, its routine application across many disciplines raises challenging technical problems. One important requirement is to achieve a separation of concerns between discipline-specific content and domain-independent infrastructure, so that new services can be developed quickly and existing services can respond effectively to time-varying
load. Another key requirement is to streamline the formation and evolution of the "virtual organizations" that create and access content. I describe the architectural principles, software, and deployments that I am and my colleagues have produced as we tackle these problems, and point to future technical challenges and scientific opportunities. I illustrate my talk with examples from astronomy and biomedicine.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves more than 4,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. DOE Office of Science. For more information about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, please visit www.lbl.gov/cs.
