BCNETwork News

December 2006

A GRID WAY TO DO RESEARCH

by Ted Shellenberg, UBC's eStategy Newsletter, January 2006

Researchers around the world are being urged to 'get on the grid' to expand their resources and add value to their findings.

Just where is the intersection where Information Technology meets Research these days? We know for certain that advanced research networks (and increasingly sophisticated end-user software tools) are being used to connect researchers to globally accessible scientific equipment, databases, sensor networks, and facilities for both computation and visualization.

We’ve long passed the time when research was the province of the lone scholar in the ivory tower. We’ve moved on to international multi-disciplinary teams of people. Universities around the world have gone from solely observation-based research to research that’s intently data-driven.

Wherever that intersection point between research and IT is, it’s very close. We’re seeing it in the creation of ‘grid infrastructure’, which typically has many layers, beginning with data gathering facilities, moving up through data storage and data management, then computation and data processing, all the way through to applications that allow the researcher to stitch it all together.

Increasingly the notion of intelligent infrastructure is seen as a way of presenting all of these layers together in ways that empower the researcher to get access to digital resources around the world. That’s the way these trends are being manifest.

At UBC over the last few months, the complexity of the research infrastructure, its scope and scale, issues of security, and questions about funding and sustainability are causing the research community to ask “Is there a better way for me to address my IT related infrastructure tools and services needs?”… other than the historic paradigm which is ‘everybody’s on their own’, where people tend to vertically integrate everything to do with IT within a research program.

Walter Stewart is an independent consultant and a former chair of CANARIE, (http://www.canarie.ca/about/index.html) Canada's advanced Internet development organization, the same group that started the Internet in this country. He has thorough knowledge of the strategic issues surrounding intelligent infrastructure on a national and global level.

“Cyberinfrastructure is a term coined by the National Science Foundation in the United States,” Stewart recently told UBC’s e-Strategy Advisory Council. “In the United Kingdom they refer to it as e-Science. In Europe, you hear about what they call e-Infrastructure. In Canada, particularly at CANARIE, we’ve been talking about Intelligent Infrastructure. Essentially the term relates to bringing together all the elements that make it possible to truly have a networked world.”

Stewart points out that no economic system can survive without infrastructure. “It’s always been about moving things to where they could become of value. The steel industry is in Hamilton, not because that’s where the iron ore is, but because Hamilton is near the Niagara electrical grid, where the infrastructure exists to turn iron ore into steel. In a knowledge-based economy, research and the economy are increasingly sharing the same kind of raw materials.”

The raw materials are data. And researchers are faced with what has been termed ‘a world of data intensity.’ Science has led the way, but today the social sciences and the humanities are deluged with data, so the possibilities presented by intelligent infrastructure should be considered as a truly campus-wide opportunity.

In 2000, researchers at the University of Berkeley in California estimated that the total production of data by humankind in all of creation had been 12 exabytes. (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003) They predicted that by 2005 the second set of 12 exabytes would be generated. But by 2003, they had to re-do the study and announce that they were wrong. In fact, the second set of 12 exabytes had already been generated by the middle of 2002. The amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media in the world had doubled over just two years.

That’s a graphic example of what we mean when we talk about a data explosion. Researchers who want to make use of that data require infrastructure. Much of that data is noise, and it requires processing into information, and refining into knowledge. As Walter Stewart points out, “If I gave you the present of a hundred tonnes of iron ore, and deprived you of the railways and the electricity to process that iron ore into steel, my gift would be a curse. But if I gave you access to that infrastructure, my gift would actually be quite generous.”

Knowledge processing these days happens at multiple locations, through many disciplines, by multi-organizational teams. “When you got up this morning and flicked on the light switch,” Stewart told e-Strategy, “you didn’t waste a nano-second wondering where the power came from. Increasingly, when you look at the resources that will be required to process the data – whether you’re an administrator or a researcher or an instructor – you’re simply going to expect that the infrastructure is there. It won’t matter to you where and how the various elements work together. It’s all going to be about your access to that data, or worse, your lack of access.”

There are obstacles, of course. Some people find ‘sharing resources’ disruptive because it's more than just technical change --- it requires a change in attitude and a willingness to collaborate. But without intelligent infrastructure we’ll be caught in a data lag behind other research activities that have it, and use it.

In Canada we have been extremely successful in building infrastructure for previous economies based on processing materials. But we now need to build cyber-infrastructure at all levels, campus, institution, regional, national, in order to compete in the knowledge economy that surrounds us. At UBC that discussion has already begun.