Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Time:

1:00pm-2:00pm

Location:

50A-5132

Seminar Speaker:

Tony Hey
Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing
Microsoft Corporation

Title:

e-Science and Cyberinfrastructure

Abstract:

The Internet was the inspiration of J.C.R.Licklider when he was at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960s. In those pre-Moores Law days, Licklider imagined a future in which researchers could access and use computers and data from anywhere in the world. He funded an elite group of Computer Science Departments in the USA which he called his InterGalactic Computing Group - to explore how to realize his vision. Today, as everyone knows, the killer applications of the Internet were email in the 1970s and Tim Berners-Lees World Wide Web in the 1990s which was developed initially as a collaboration tool for the particle physics academic community. In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research from systems biology and bio-informatics to earth systems science and chemo-informatics. In the context of science and engineering, this is the e-Science agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary Cyberinfrastructure to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create the new e-Infrastructure. When mature, it is clear that such an infrastructure will support the creation of dynamic Virtual Organizations and collaborative environments for many types of application in both academia and industry. This new Cyberinfrastructure will clearly be of relevance to more than just the research community and will support both the e-learning and digital library communities as well as many business applications. This technology is likely also to change the nature of scientific publication with institutional or subject repositories linked to digital archives containing the primary research data.
Bio:
As corporate vice president for technical computing, Tony Hey coordinates efforts across Microsoft Corp. to collaborate with researchers worldwide in various fields of science and engineering
A top researcher in the field of parallel computing, Hey previously headed the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, which he helped build into one of Englands pre-eminent computer science research institutions. Since 2001, Hey had served as director of the United Kingdoms e-Science Initiative, managing the governments efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.s Royal Academy of Engineering and has been a member of the European Unions Information Society Technology Advisory Group. He has also advised various countries on advancing their competitiveness in the global technology economy. In 2005, Hey received the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire honor for services to science. Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with both an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.

Sponsor of Seminar:

Horst Simon

Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov