WMC’04 LUNCHEON SPEECH

New Directions in Simulation

Geoffrey Charles Fox

Community Grids Laboratory

Indiana University

Abstract

We discuss some features and trends in simulation today. Most very large scale simulations on parallel machines are using technology (such as MPI) which is not substantially advanced over the last twenty years. Attempts to produce more advanced programming models have been largely unsuccessful -- we ask, and try to answer, why?

While the debate between vector and commodity clusters still rages, Grids enable linkage of resources around the globe and allows real-time integration of a data deluge with simulations. This is being driven by new applications that could be more amenable to new approaches.

Where will this lead?

Short Bio:

Geoffrey Charles Fox (gcf@indiana.edu)

Fox received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University and is now professor of Computer Science, Informatics, and Physics at Indiana University. He is director of the Community Grids Laboratory of the Pervasive Technology Laboratories at Indiana University. He previously held positions at Caltech, Syracuse University and Florida State University.

Fox has worked in a variety of applied computer science fields with his work on computational physics evolving into contributions to parallel computing initially involving the hypercube architecture. He has worked on the computing issues in several application areas – currently focusing on Earthquake Science. Over the last four years, a major activity has been the use of Object Web technologies to build collaboration systems and their application in an integrated approach to synchronous and asynchronous distance education. He has led activities to develop prototype high performance Java and Fortran compilers and their runtime support. His research group has pioneered use of distributed object and service architectures for both collaboration and distributed computing. In particular the Gateway computational portal was one of the earliest systems to integrate object and grid technologies. The GlobalMMCS project is developing the Web service collaboration model using a Grid messaging system NaradaBrokering. He helped set up the Java Grande forum to encourage use of Java in large-scale computations. Fox co-chairs the Grid Computing Environment (GCE) working group of the Grid Forum and is developing the portlet approach to computational portals.

He is the main editor of the journal Concurrency & Computation: Practice & Experience and recently published a book: "Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality " co-edited with Fran Berman and Tony Hey.