Internet2 Global Summit

We'll be making two presentations at the Internet2 Global Summit: 

SaaS and the Transformation of Research, by Vas Vasiliadis</a>

Wednesday, April 9, 3-4 p.m. MST

We have made much progress over the past decade toward effective distributed cyberinfrastructure. In big-science fields such as high energy physics, astronomy, and climate, thousands benefit daily from tools that enable the distributed management and analysis of large quantities of data. Exploding data volumes and powerful simulation tools mean that most researchers will soon require similar capabilities, but they often do not have the resources or expertise to build and maintain the necessary IT infrastructure. Faced with a similar problem in industry, companies have adopted the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model to "free" themselves from IT complexity. We see the same shift occurring in the academic research world over the next decade - indeed, many of us use SaaS services such as Google Docs and Dropbox on a daily basis as an integral part of our research workflow. Vas will describe a vision for the next generation of research cyberinfrastructure, and work that the University of Chicago has embarked on to further empower investigators and enable them to access new capabilities beyond the boundaries of their campus.

Leveraging Digital Infrastructure and Innovative Software Services to Accelerate Scientific Discovery, by Steve Tuecke

Wednesday, April 9, 4:30-5:30 p.m. MST

The needs of the scientific research community sit at the intersection of advanced technologies, big data, and global networks of collaboration. Innovative programs in Canada and the United States are leveraging national high performance digital infrastructure to facilitate the delivery of software tools and services to accelerate scientific research.

In this collaborative session, Hervé Guy will explain how CANARIE is changing the paradigm for research software development. Through the Research Software initiative, Canadian researchers and developers from the private and public sectors receive CANARIE investment to develop complete research software platforms that incorporate all the services and tools required to perform research within a specific discipline. These developers then commit to opening portions of the platform’s functionality to provide reusable software services (such as authentication, computation, data manipulation, or visualization) that can be easily leveraged by other research platforms across diverse disciplines. Hervé will illustrate how this model is resulting in the efficient development of new platforms that accelerate time to discovery. Recent ground-breaking and cross-discipline software services developed through this program will be showcased, highlighting the benefits of this collaborative initiative for the scientific community.

Steve Tuecke of the University of Chicago will describe how to build a secure, scalable campus data service that delivers advanced data management capabilities to researchers while significantly reducing the development, integration, and operations burden on resource providers. Using Globus as an exemplar, Tuecke will illustrate why the user experience is critical to making these capabilities accessible to a broad range of users at national research and education institutions, leveraging intuitive web interfaces and hiding access complexities behind a sophisticated federated identity infrastructure. Tuecke will demonstrate how Globus and the Science DMZ concept may be used to optimize delivery of these services on networks that span campus computing, public cloud, and national supercomputing resources.