Designing for Palpability in e-Research
Alexander Voss
alex.voss@ncess.ac.uk
National Centre for e-Social Science
and e-Science Institute
With: Rob Procter, Mark Hartswood, Mark
Rouncefield and Roger Slack
13th May 2007
The Grid Vision of Seamlessness

‘a hardware and software
infrastructure that provides
dependable, consistent,
pervasive, and inexpensive
access to high-end
computational capabilities.’
(Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman)

Like the power grid, the Grid
makes services available
through common interfaces
without the user having to
worry about the details of how
these services are provided.
13th May 2007
Grid Resources as Commodies?

There are various reasons why the notion of access to
Grid resources as undifferentiated commodities is
problematic:
– Resources come in any number of types and are provided by
multiple, independent resource providers
– There is a lack of common (technical and organisational)
standards for the management of access to these
heterogeneous resources
– Software licensing issues often hinder the use of compute
resources on a large scale
– Users of datasets in particular need to understand what their
quality attributes are, how they may be used and how data may
or may not change over time
13th May 2007
Scientific Workflows




Scientific workflow systems such as Taverna or Kepler
allow scientists to define orchestrations of services
providing access to resources on the Grid.
Workflows are an important instrument not only for
automation but also for elaborating and documenting
the research process.
Direct manipulation or form based input make this
functionality available to researchers who need not
acquire programming skills.
Complex social relations are forming around the
development and (re-) use of workflows in groups and
communities.
13th May 2007
Workflows are Potentially Fragile Artefacts
13th May 2007
Scientific Workflows


Workflows are complex composite processes that are
long-running and subject to possible failure.
There is, therefore, a need for people to be able to
reason about their properties, to investigate:
–
–
–
–
–

State and runtime behaviour
Interaction with services
Correctness
Failure modes and recovery
Provenance of data produced
This kind of work is required prior to, during and after
the execution of a workflow.
13th May 2007
Adding Collaboration to the Picture






Of course, if we are not “merely” talking about technical
assemblages, things get more complicated.
Awareness: What are people up to?
How can we provide resources for people to account for
the activities of others as well as for what’s going on in
technical systems?
Provenance as well as practical questions
Adding issues of privacy and confidentiality
We may want to know what data is used by whom and
for what purpose
13th May 2007
Palpable Computing







ubiquitous/ambient computing
complemented with palpable computing:
invisibility - visibility
construction - de-construction
scalability - understandability
heterogeneity - coherence
change - stability
automation - user control and deference
Büscher et al. Bottom-up, top-down? Connecting software architecture
design with use. Available at: http://www.ist-palcom.org
13th May 2007
Conclusions



Palpability is a potentially powerful concept for the design of
e-Research technologies and infrastructures
There is a tension between the vision of seamless operation of the
Grid, various technical and organisation issues and the need to
reason about, manage and document the provenance of research
outputs
e-Research poses significant challenges (a non-exhaustive list):
–
–
–
–
–
–

Lack of control over services
Different, potentially conflicting policies
Potentially vast scale
Long-running, costly operations
Need to predict, steer and document computational behaviour
Work in wider collaborative contexts spanning various boundaries
What additional challenges would pervasive e-Research pose?
13th May 2007