Building on the successful selection and funding of two UK e-Science research themes related to data-intensive computing (3DPAS and DIR; to be hosted by the e-Science Institute, Edinburgh), we will couple US Researchers to the intellectual advances that these year long research themes (2010-11) will engender. This award will support participation by ten US-based researchers in three workshops, as part of the eSI Research themes on data-intensive research to be held in Edinburgh, UK.
Workshops associated with the eSI Research Theme will be organized along the following three tracks: (i) Abstractions for distributed and dynamic data-intensive applications, (ii) Understanding the issues to enable Relational technology to be widely and effectively used in the support of data-intensive methods at extreme scales, and (iii) Algorithms, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for data-intensive research
Many problems at the forefront of science, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences are increasingly complex and interdisciplinary due to the plethora of data sources and computational methods available today. A common feature across many of these problems is the amount and diversity of data and computation that must be integrated to yield insights. Such data is increasingly large-scale and distributed: the datasets, their locations, and associated scheduling decisions are time-dependent. These workshop investigated applications that have these characteristics; in other words, it operated at the triple point of dynamic and distributed and data-intensive (D3) attributes. These workshops were designed to investigate the primary challenges in designing, developing and executing such '3D' applications. They involved computer scientists and domain specific scientists, as well as infrastructure experts. The specific aim of this project was to support the participation of US researchers at these workshops on Distributed Dynamic Data-Intensive Programming Abstractions and Systems organized at/by UK e-Science Institute organized. In the process US researchers were able to appreciate the broader landscape as well as improve the understanding of US applications as well as improve state-of-the-art in development and deploying such '3D' applications. The workshop report is available at the UK eSI wiki (www.esi.ac.uk). The primary findings are also captured in a publication to be submitted to the journal on concurrency and computation: practise and experience.
