Accelerating and democratizing science through cloud-based services.

Abstract

Many businesses today save time and money, and increase their agility, by outsourcing mundane IT tasks to cloud providers. The author argues that similar methods can be used to overcome the complexities inherent in increasingly data-intensive, computational, and collaborative scientific research. He describes Globus Online, a system that he and his colleagues are developing to realize this vision. he scientific community today has unprecedented opportunities to effect transformational change in how individuals and teams engage in discovery. The driving force is a set of interrelated new capabilities that, when harnessed, can enable dramatic acceleration in the discovery process: greater availability of massive data, exponentially faster computers, ultra-high-speed networks, and deep interdisciplinary collaboration. The opportunity - and challenge - is to make these capabilities accessible not just to a few 'big science' projects but to every researcher at every level. Here, I argue that the key to seizing this opportunity is embracing software delivery methods that haven't been widely adopted in research, notably software as a service (SaaS) - a technology that forms an important part of what people refer to as the cloud. I also describe projects in the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory that aim to realize this vision, focusing initially on data movement and management.