Invitation to Participate

It is our great pleasure to announce that the International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2012 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei, from 26 February to 2 March 2012, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC), Taipei, Taiwan.

“Convergence, Collaboration, Innovation” is the theme of ISGC 2012. The last decade has seen the wide-scale emergence of e-Infrastructure as a critical asset for the modern e-Scientist. The emergence of large-scale research infrastructures and instruments that has produced a torrent of electronic data is forcing a generational change in the scientific process and the mechanisms used to analyse the resulting data deluge. No longer can the processing of these vast amounts of data and production of relevant scientific results be undertaken by a single scientist. Virtual Research Communities that span organisations around the world, through an integrated digital infrastructure that connects the trust and administrative domains of multiple resource providers, have become critical in supporting these analyses.

ISGC 2012 will be the 10th meeting that over the last decade has tracked the convergence, collaboration and innovation of individual researchers across the Asia Pacific region to a coherent community and as a result has helped drive the growth of regional e-Science activities and its collaborations around the world.

Submission Deadline: Friday, 7 October 2011

Submission Information: http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2012/cfp.html
Online Submission: http://indico3.twgrid.org/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=44
Abstract Word Limit: 500 words


Topics of Interest

Applications and results from the Virtual Research Communities and Industry:

1. High Energy Physics
Submissions should report on experience with High Energy Physics (HEP) applications that exploit grid and cloud computing services, applications that are planned or under development, or application tools and methodologies. Topics of interest include:

- End-user data analysis;
- Management of distributed data;
- Applications level monitoring;
- Performance analysis and system tuning;
- Workload scheduling;
- Management of a HEP collaboration as a virtual organization;
- Comparison between grid and other distributed computing paradigms as enablers of physics data handling and analysis;
- Expectations for the evolution of HEP computing models drawn from recent experience handling extremely large and geographically diverse datasets.

2. Biomedicine and Life Sciences
During the last decade, Biomedicine and Life Sciences have dramatically changed thanks to the use of High Performance Computing and highly Distributed Computing Infrastructures such as grids and clouds.
 
Submissions should concentrate on practical applications in the fields of Biomedicine and Life Sciences, such as:

- Cloud-based use of biomedical data;
- Medical Imaging;
- Drug Discovery;
- Nano-medicine;
- Public health applications / infrastructures;
- High throughput biological data processing/analysis;
- Integration of semantically diverse data sets and applications;
- Combining grid with distributed data and services;
- Biomedical data management issues;
- Applications for non-technical end users.

3. Earth Science, Environmental Changes and Natural Disaster Mitigation
Earth science is the basis for understanding the Earth, investigating the environmental changes, and probing the potential hazards.  Natural disaster mitigation is one of the most critical regional issues in Asia. e–Science opens new opportunities for global collaboration on data-intensive problems in unprecedented capability. Studies to understand the earth nature, uncover the global changes, demystify the natural disaster mechanisms, and e-Science applications to support some of those are all very much welcomed. Submissions to this session should cover results, technologies, methods and systems for distributed collaboration and computation in support of the Earth Science study and disaster mitigation areas. Earth science has increasing needs for vast amounts of data with which to model, analyze and measure the history and evolution of the earth. This session would in particular address how these challenges are being addressed with the aids of e-Science paradigm.

4. Humanities and Social Sciences
Researchers working in the social sciences and the humanities have started to explore the use of advanced computing infrastructures such as grids to address the grand challenges of their disciplines. For example, social scientists working on issues such as globalization, international migration, uneven development and deprivation are interested in linking complementary datasets and models at local, national, regional and global scales.

Similarly, in the humanities, researchers from a wide range of disciplines are interested in managing, linking and analyzing distributed datasets and corpora. There has been a significant increase in the digital material available to researchers, through digitization programmes but also because more and more data is now “born digital”.

As more and more applications demonstrate the successful application of e-Research approaches and technologies in the humanities and social sciences, questions arise as to whether common models of usage exist that could be underpinned by a generic e-Infrastructure. The session will focus on experiences made in developing e-Research approaches and tools that go beyond single application demonstrators. Their wider applicability may be based on a set of common concerns, common approaches or reusable tools and services. We are also specifically inviting  contributions concerned with teaching e-Research approaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels as well as other initiatives to "bridge the chasm" between early adopters the majority of researchers.

Activity to enable the provisioning of a Resource Infrastructure:

5. Operation and Management
This session will cover the current state of the art and recent advances in managing the operation of large scale research infrastructures. The scope of the session will include advances in monitoring tools and metrics, service management, the implementation and management of Service Level Agreements, improving service and site reliability, interoperability between infrastructures, user and operational support procedures, and other topics relevant to general grid and cloud operations.

6. Middleware and Interoperability
Middleware technologies are an inevitable cornerstone of modern federated Grid and Cloud infrastructures. Their robustness, scalability and reliability are of major importance to support academic and business infrastructure users in gaining new scientific insights or increasing their revenues. Until recently middleware technologies were developed from specific requirements of certain communities and use cases. Today middleware technologies must converge by employing open standards to enable interoperability among technologies and infrastructures or to re-use components from other technologies – convergence, collaboration and innovation is and must be a key element of this endeavor. Therefore submissions should highlight their contribution to the convergence, collaboration and innovation of interoperable middleware technologies for federated IT-infrastructures. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- One-step-ahead interoperable middleware solutions (Grid-to-Grid, Grid-to-Cloud and vise-versa, Cloud-to-Cloud) including application use cases, employed open standards and implementation highlights;
- Examples for convergence of middleware technologies, e.g. replacement of components by external, standardized and interoperable components from other middleware distributions.

7. Security and Networking
Security and networking are at the forefront of the challenges in the deployment of large-scale e-Infrastructures. Research communities require secure access to distributed services linked together via high-performance networks. The many computing resource centres must be able to collaborate in a trustworthy, scalable and federated security environment.

Opportunities for innovation exist in many areas of security and networking to address these requirements. These include developments in security middleware, operational security, security policy, identity management, virtual organisation management, network developments for e-Infrastructures, network monitoring and the move to IPv6. Submissions should address solutions to these and related security and networking issues.

8. Infrastructure clouds and Virtualisation
This track will focus on the use of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing and virtualisation technologies in large-scale distributed computing environments in science and technology. We solicit papers describing underlying virtualisation and “cloud” technology, scientific applications and case studies related to using such technology in large scale infrastructure as well as solutions overcoming challenges and leveraging opportunities in this setting. Of particular interest are results exploring usability of virtualisation and infrastructure clouds from the perspective of scientific applications, the performance, reliability and fault-tolerance of solutions used, data management issues. Papers dealing with the cost, price, and cloud markets, with security and privacy as well as portability and standards, are also most welcome.

9. Business Models and Sustainability
Whenever a business is established, it employs a particular business model that describes the architecture of the value (economic, social, etc.) creation, delivery, and capture mechanisms employed by the business enterprise. Business models are used to describe and classify businesses (especially in an entrepreneurial setting), but they are also used by managers inside companies to explore possibilities for future development. Business models are also referred to in some instances within the context of accounting for purposes of public reporting.

Sustainability is the capacity to endure and interfaces with economics through the social and ecological consequences of economic activity. Among the many ways of living more sustainably, one can cite the use of science to develop new technologies (green technologies, renewable energy, or new and affordable cost-effective practices) to make adjustments that conserve resources.

These two concepts apply to the e-infrastructure world and the purpose of this session will be to report about existing or foreseen initiatives aiming at guaranteeing the long-term sustainability of e-Infrastructures by means of business models.

Technologies that provide access and exploitation of different site resources and infrastructures:

10. Data Management
Data management encompasses the organization, distribution, storage, access, and validation of digital assets.  Data management requirements can be characterized by data life stages that include shared project collections, to formally published libraries, to preservation of reference collections.  Papers are sought that demonstrate the management of data through the multiple phases of the scientific data life cycle, from creation to re-use.  Of particular importance are demonstrations of systems that validate assertions about collection properties, including integrity, chain of custody, and provenance.

11. Distributed Volunteer and Desktop Grid Computing
This track will highlight the latest research achievements and experiences related to distributed volunteer computing and campus wide (or institutional) Desktop Grids. The topics will cover new technologies of the related software frameworks, recent application developments, as well as infrastructure operation and user support techniques for all levels: campus, institutional, and for  very large scale cyberscience computing.

Special focus will be on the following areas:

- Interoperability with other and integration in other e-infrastructures;
- Virtualisation techniques;
- Data management;
- Energy efficiency and Green computing aspects;
- Quality of service;
- Novel uses of volunteer computing and Desktop Grids;
- Best practices and (social) impacts.

12. High Throughput Computing
High Throughput Computing refers to a computing paradigm for delivering a large amount of computing capacity over relatively long periods of time in solving complex problems, as opposed to High Performance Computing focusing on a large amount of computing power for short periods of time. HTC is more concerned with getting as many as independent jobs possible done on available resources.

With the growing availability of computing resources such as public grids (e.g., EGEE/EGI and OSG) and public/private clouds (e.g., Amazon EC2), it becomes possible to develop and deploy unprecedented large-scale HTC applications and systems by mobilizing as many computing resources as possible. However, it is quite challenging to effectively access, aggregate and manage all available resources that are usually under control by resource providers. This session will solicit recent research and development achievements and best practices related to HTC. The topics of interest include, but not limited to the followings:

- Experiences on the development of large-scale HTC applications;
- Best practices of HTC systems and environments;
- HTC on Cluster/Grid/Cloud computing;
- Integrated and coordinated use of different e-infrastructures for HTC;
- Robustness and Reliability of HTC applications and systems over a long-time scale;
- Interoperability of Grids and Clouds for HTC.

13. High Performance, Manycore and GPU Computing
HPC resources, the emergence of many-core processors and GPUs as well as the requirements from user communities to utilize these new resources in modern federated Grid and Cloud infrastructures has increased both their complexity as well as scope. Efficiently using single instances of such resources with enabled and optimized applications and simulations is a major endeavor of the scientific community. When integrating such resources in Grids and Clouds with the aim of a federated use add another dimension of complexity. Therefore submissions should focus on the collaborative and innovative aspects in this domain. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Integration of HPC, many-core and GPU computing in Grid and Cloud infrastructures including application use cases and technological infrastructure advancements;
- Application use cases for an collaborative use of HPC, many-core and GPU computing resources in federated Grid and Cloud infrastructures including open issues in middleware technologies;
- Technologies for virtualised HPC-as-a-Service (HPCaaS) and GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) including application use cases;
- Technologies for efficient use of virtualisation techniques on many-core processors for “traditional” Grid use cases.


Remarks

All abstracts will be reviewed by ISGC program committee and track conveners. Notification of acceptance will be sent by the Secretariat by 12 December, 2011. The symposium proceedings will be published on-line (Proceedings of Science, PoS) afterwards.  Information about the preparation of a final proceedings version will be announced on the symposium website. For more information, please visit event website at http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2012/index.html , or contact:

Ms. Angelina Shen
Email: angelina.shen@twgrid.org
Tel: +886-2-2789-8371
Fax: +886-2-2783-5434
Office Address: Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Rm P4A-4, No.128, Sec2, Academia Rd, Nankang, Taipei 11529, Taiwan

Sincerely,

ISGC 2012 Secretariat
ASGC
Taipei, Taiwan