IEE-Scotland Electronics, Control & Informatics.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
KEYNOTE LECTURE
The GRID –from Metacomputing to collaboratories
Professor Malcolm Atkinson
Centre Director, National e-Science Centre
Tuesday 18th February 2003
National e-Science Centre
15 South College Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AA
7.00pm
(finger buffet from 6pm; Cheese & Wine after the lecture to 9pm),)
FREE ENTRY
In the future, e-Science will refer to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through
distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, this will require access to very large
data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the
individual user scientists. Besides information stored in Web pages, scientists will need easy access to
expensive remote facilities, to computing resources - either as dedicated Teraflop computers or cheap
collections of PCs - and to information stored in dedicated databases. Commercial organizations too
will require similar resource for many classes of problems.
The Grid is an architecture proposed to bring all these issues together and make a reality of such a
vision. Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, inventors of the Globus approach to the Grid define the Grid as
an enabler for Virtual Organisations: ‘An infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated
resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources.’
Prof. Malcolm Atkinson is the Director of the NeSC, working for both the Department of Computing
Science, University of Glagsow and the Division Of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has a
long track-record of contributions to research in large and long-lived systems.
For further information contact: Aileen Hall, e-mail: ahall@iee.org