GRID technologies for GRID technologies for learninglearning

Pierluigi RitrovatoPierluigi Ritrovato

Centro di Ricerca in Matematica Pura ed ApplicataCentro di Ricerca in Matematica Pura ed Applicata

OnLine Educa BerlinOnLine Educa BerlinDecember 3-5 2003December 3-5 2003

Future Technology for Learning Future Technology for Learning sessionsession

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Outline

What is the GRIDWhat is the GRID

The GRID historyThe GRID history

What is availableWhat is available

GRID vs WebGRID vs Web

Why grid for Learning Why grid for Learning

Some relevant projectsSome relevant projects

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What are The Grid “The grid is an emerging

infrastructure that will fundamentally change the way we think about - and use - computing.

The grid will connect multiple regional and national

computational grids to create a universal source of computing

power.”

The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Foster and Kesselman, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999

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Grid has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed

computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, innovative applications, and, in some cases,

high-performance orientation for problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations

Source: Foster I., Kesselman C., Tuecke S. The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual

OrganizationsJanuary 2001

The Current GRID Vision

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Outline

What are the GRIDWhat are the GRID

The GRID historyThe GRID history

What is availableWhat is available

GRID vs WebGRID vs Web

Why grid for Learning Why grid for Learning

Some relevant projectsSome relevant projects

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Where the Grid is coming from

Work over the last decade on several distinct topics

Metacomputing - combining distributed heterogeneous computing resources for solving a single problemData Archiving - building collections of data on specific topics with open metadata catalogues and well-documented data formatsCollaborative Working - network-based facilities for distributed, concurrent working on shared informationData visualization - large-scale immersive facilities for 3D visual interaction with data coupled to computational analysisInstrumentation control - remote control of experimental equipment and real time data gathering systems

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Who are using the Grid?

PhysicistsLarge Hadron Collider Data Grid

Engineersreal-time visualisation, rapid turn-round simulation evaluation

Astrophysicistssearching across many instrument-specific data archives to study a new class of object at all wavelengths

Environmentalistsclimate change, pollution

BiologistsGenome research, drugs design

. . .

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Outline

What are the GRIDWhat are the GRID

The GRID historyThe GRID history

What is availableWhat is available

GRID vs WebGRID vs Web

Why grid for Learning Why grid for Learning

Some relevant projectsSome relevant projects

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The current state

1st Generation" involved local "Metacomputers" with basic services such as distributed file systems and site-wide single sign on, upon which adventurous software developers created distributed applications with custom communications protocols.

2nd Generationbegan with projects such Condor, I-WAY (the origin of Globus), Legion (origin of Avaki) and UNICOR (from EU), 2G Grids offered basic building blocks, but deployment involved significant customization making interoperability problematic, and interoperability among 2G Grid systems is very difficult.

3rd GenerationThe GGF community is taking lessons learned from 1G and 2G Grids and from web services technologies and concepts to create 3G architectures like the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) whereby a set of common interface specifications supports the interoperability of discrete, independently developed services.

Source: GridToday October 27/2003 Vol 2 n.43THE RISE OF THIRD-GENERATION GRIDS

By Charlie Catlett, Global Grid Forum Chairman

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OGSAthe Open Grid Services

ArchitectureService orientation to virtualize resourcesDefine fundamental Grid service behaviors

A unifying framework for interoperability & establishment of total system properties

Service description and discoveryService lifetime managementAuthentication, authorization, policyNotification

Integration with Web servicesLeverage on commercial base standards

Neutral wrt the hosting environment technologies and developing languages

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Grids and Industry: Early Examples

Butterfly.net: Grid for multi-player games

Entropia: Distributed computing

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Europe vs USA

Europe hones an edge in technologyContinent leads U.S. in linking PC 'grids'By John Markoff and Jennifer L. Schenker/NYT (The New York Time)Tuesday, November 11, 2003

“… Novartis used American software technology to harness the power of its office PC's, but European and American scientists and government officials said Europe was moving faster than the United States to capitalize on the approach, which is called grid computing. “

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EU funded projects in 5FP

IST Grid Projects

EGSOAVO

GRIACrossGrid

GridLab

GRIP

DataTAG

EuroGrid

DAMIEN

DataGrid

GEMSS

MammoGrid

BioGridSeLeNe

OpenMolGrid

COG

FlowGrid

GRACEMOSES

GRASP

1-10-2000 1-10-2001 1-10-2002

GRIDSTART cluster

Wave 2 Projects

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Outline

What are the GRIDWhat are the GRID

The GRID historyThe GRID history

What is availableWhat is available

GRID vs WebGRID vs Web

Why grid for Learning Why grid for Learning

Some relevant projectsSome relevant projects

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GRID vs WEB

DynamicGeneral resources sharingScientific target

Architecture orientedAiming at standardising the behaviour

Focused on interoperability, reliability and securityBased on web standards

StaticData sharingBusiness and masses targetInfrastructure oriented

Aiming at standardising the communication (protocols)

Focused on sharing and collecting information

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For More InformationGRIDSTART

www.gridstart.orgGlobal Grid Forum

www.ggf.orgGRID Today

www.gridtoday.com

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Outline

What are the GRIDWhat are the GRID

The GRID historyThe GRID history

What is availableWhat is available

GRID vs WebGRID vs Web

Why grid for LearningWhy grid for Learning

Some relevant projectsSome relevant projects

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Motivationlacks of existing (e)Learning practices and

environments

based on the information transfer paradigm with focus on the content and the “teacher”

find the best way for presenting content in order to transmit information to learners

Technology driven approachMissing specific didactical modelsall the students are considered the samefinds its perfect technical mirror in the “page oriented approach to the Web”e-Learning becomes an activity in which teachers produce, and students consume, multimedia books on the Web

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MotivationThe Learning Paradigm Shift

knowledge construction, rather than information transferfocus is on the learner and on the learning strategiesBased on new forms of learning:

Experiential and contextualised - the understanding of concepts through direct experience of their manifestation in realistic contexts

Learning as a social process – active collaboration with other students, teachers, tutors, experts or, in general, available human peersPersonalised learning - guarantee the learner will reach a cognitive excellence through different learning paths tailored on learner’s characteristics and preferences

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Some characteristics of future learning scenarios

Service Orientation Dynamism, dynamism, dynamism High demand of interoperabilityOpen ArchitectureSecurity and TrustMulti institutional account and billing protocols

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Why GRID technologiesAre demonstrating their effectiveness for implementing e-Science infrastructure for sharing data, applications and knowledge

Allow the virtualisation and sharing of several kind of resources facilitating the dynamic context generation

Facilitate the realisation of ubiquitous computing conceptFacilitate the realisation of emerging challenging learning scenarios through dynamic VO

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Outline

What are the GRIDWhat are the GRID

The GRID historyThe GRID history

What is availableWhat is available

GRID vs WebGRID vs Web

Why grid for Learning Why grid for Learning

Some relevant projectsSome relevant projects

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Intelligent Web Teacher is an extensible application framework for building learning solutionsIt has been designed for facilitating the paradigm shift

www.momanet.it/iwt

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GRASPGRID based Application Service Provision

www.eu-grasp.net

GRIDbasic

infrastructure for dynamic

distributed computing

OGSA

WebServicesinterfaces for remote procedure calls

ASPbusiness concept between

financially independent entities

Flexible but proprietary

ASP

Interoperable component based ASP

GRASPGRASP

www.lege-wg.org/Activity/Home

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ELeGIEuropean Learning GRID

Infrastructure

FP6 Integrated Project under negotiation

23 partners from 8 EU Countries

4 years

5 test-beds

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Ritrovato PierluigiRitrovato Pierluigiritrovato@crmpa.unisa.itritrovato@crmpa.unisa.it CRMPA – University of SalernoCRMPA – University of Salerno

+39 089 964289/2201+39 089 964289/2201

Useful LinksUseful Links

ELeGI – coming soon!IWT – www.momanet.it/iwtLeGE-WG - www.lege-wg.org/Activity/HomeGRASP – www.eu-grasp.orgGRIDSTART - www.gridstart.orgGlobal Grid Forum - www.ggf.orgGRID Today - www.gridtoday.com

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Some future learning scenariosField trip

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future learning environment architecture

Operating Systems

OGSA Infrastructure

OGSA generic services(orchestration, data mngt., logging, )

OGSA Domain Specific Services(user profiling, skill assessment, LO mngt, ontology mngt, …)

Learning GRID Applications(Virtual Campus, Virtual Scientific Experiments, personalized mobile learning, …)

Web services run time engine

Physical resources