The Cloud, the Client and Big Data
The first paradigm of science was experimental. This was quickly followed by theory to explain the results of experiments. The third paradigm was computation which allows us to explore theory where experimentation is difficult or impossible. There is a fourth paradigm that can be described as deriving new knowledge from massive amounts of data even in cases where we may have very little theory to guide us. This is important because almost every branch of academic research is inundated by the data deluge and basic research methods have to evolve rapidly to cope with it. Access to massive amounts of digital data has already transformed the IT industry. Massive scale data clouds designed to index the web have transformed the advertising and publishing industry. We have mobile client devices that have applications that give us total information about where we are at any given instant including where to eat and where to catch a cab. Our computers are learning to see and recognize us as we walk through instrumented spaces. That capability is the result of machine learning applied to massive data collections. However, the academic research community is lagging behind in this revolution. While the most adventurous researchers have access to massive supercomputing facilities and communities like high energy physics have well established data analysis pipelines, the majority of researchers limit the scope of their research to what they can do with the computer on their desk. In this talk we will discuss an approach to removing this limitation by building cloud-based data analytics services that are easy to use from the researchers desktop.
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Dennis Gannon's Biography
Dennis Gannon is Director of Applications for the Cloud Computing Futures Group. Prior to coming to Microsoft, Dennis was a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University and the Science Director for the Indiana Pervasive Technology Labs and, for seven years, Chair of the Department of Computer Science. His research interests include large-scale cyber infrastructure, programming systems and tools, distributed computing, computer networks, parallel programming, computational science, problem solving environments and performance analysis of Grid and MPP systems. Dennis led the DARPA HPC++ project and was one of the architects of the Department of Energy SciDAC Common Software Component Architecture (CCA). He was a partner in the NSF Computational Cosmology Grand Challenge project, the NSF Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery and the NCSA Alliance. Dennis served on the steering committee of the GGF, now the Open Grid Forum and the Executive Steering Committee of the NSF Teragrid where he managed the TeraGrid Science Advisory Board. Dennis was the Program Chair for the IEEE 2002 High Performance Distributed Computing Conference, the General Chair of the 1998 International Symposium on Scientific Object Oriented Programming Environments and the 2000 ACM Java Grande Conference, and Program Chair for the 1997 ACM International Conference on Supercomputing as well as the 1995 IEEE Frontiers of Massively Parallel Processing. He was the Program Chair for the International Grid Conference, Barcelona, 2006 and co-chair of the 2008 IEEE e-Science Conference. While Dennis was Chair of the Computer Science Department at Indiana University, he led the team that designed the University’s new School of Informatics. For that effort, Dennis was given the School’s Hermes Award in 2006. He has published over 100 refereed articles and co-edited 3 books. Dennis received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1980 after receiving a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis. |
