Education and Grid Services

Education and Grid Services

Geoffrey Fo

Professor of Computer Science, Informatics, Physics Community Grids Laboratory

Pervasive Technology Laboratories Indiana University Bloomington IN 47404

[email protected]

Some Players with Education Grid like Technologies

n IMS and ADL in the USA have set standards for some of the

special learning metadata structures

n CHEF (Michigan) and Colloquia (Bangor) are academic

groupware projects aimed at education

• Access Grid from Argonne is Audio-Video conferencing

n Sakai and OKI are Mellon Foundation projects implementing

electronic learning capabilities

n Blackboard and WebCT are popular (some places) academic

e-learning support systems

• Several inhouse efforts like OnCourse at Indiana

n Docent, Topclass etc. are learning content management systems

LCMS mainly selling to corporate training market

n Centra, Interwise, Placeware, WebEx, GrooveNetworks are well

Grids in a Nutshell

n Grids are by definition the best of HPCC, Web Services, Agents,

Distributed Objects, Peer-to-peer networks, Collaborative environments

n Grid applications are typically zero or one very large

supercomputers, lots of conventional machines, with unlimited data and/or people supporting an electronic (virtual) community

• Data sources and people are latency tolerant …

• Multiple supercomputers (or clusters) on same Grid as in

TeraGrid/ETF largely for sharing of data and by people

n Grids are supported by Global Grid Forum, W3C, OASIS …

setting standards

n Grids are a “service oriented architecture” hiding irrelevant

details

• Services are electronic resources communicating by messages • Message based architecture gives scalable loosely coupled

Information/Knowledge Grids

n

Distributed

(10’s to 1000’s) of

data sources

(instruments,

file systems, curated databases …)

n

Data Deluge

: 1 (now) to 100’s

petabyte

s/year (2012)

n

Possible

filters

assigned dynamically (

on-demand

)

•

Run image processing algorithm on telescope image

•

Run Gene sequencing algorithm on compiled data

n

Needs

decision support

front end with “what-if”

simulations

n

Metadata

(

provenance

)

critical to annotate data

n

Integrate

across experiment

as in multi-wavelength

astronomy

Raw (HPC) Resources Middleware Database Portal Service s Syste Service s Syste Service s Syste Service s Application Servic Libraries Use Services “Core Grid

Typical Grid

Architecture

Service ApplicationService

Re-use

Re-use

Applicatio Customization

Each service should b

Some Technical Issues

n

All IT approaches support systems with multiple

capabilities

• They often reveal and/or standardize interfaces

• They could be different method calls, Java classes, or

Web/Grid service interfaces

n

We will ONLY use the word

Service

when interface can

be efficiently accessed by messages with service as an

isolated single service

• Grids build systems from message-based services

Module A Module

B

Method Call 1 to 10 microseconds

Service A Service

B Message_s

10 to 1000 millisecond latency

Message-based or Method-based

n

Method-based

interfaces are most efficient but can only

be run in that fashion in a single

monolithic

implementation

•

One service

with

multiple ports

•

i.e. each interface might be accessed via message but

all capabilities need to be

co-located

•

Technologies like

Java RMI

allow distributed objects

but requires serialization (often non trivial) and

unclear if application supports performance loss

n

“

Message-based services

” support standards and

Sakai

n The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, and the uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools.

n Sakai builds on OKI – Open Knowledge Initiative – interfaces n These Open Service Interface Definitions were developed

outside the Grid process but appear to have overlaps with many Web service and Grid standards

• Note OGSA-DAI, Security, Workflow, WS-Notification,

Grid monitoring, WebDAV overlaps

n Although they are called “services”, I think they are being

developed initially inside a (single) Java container

Portals

n These are used rather inconsistently for

• A general term for the whole user experience with an interface to multiple capabilities

• Narrow specification of certain capabilities such as customization, server side support for web page generation, aggregation of document fragments (one per service), security

• Broad specification to include both user interface and services

n Note portals tend to be monolithic frameworks because that’s

how one used to build such things

• Jetspeed and CHEF’s modification of it are both frameworks

n Portals need to be broken up into distributed message based

services for security, customization, layout, rendering

• Shouldn’t invest too much in today’s frameworks although they have

some wonderful features

n However Portals do encourage “component” model for user

interfaces and so this fits service model so every service can be packaged with its (document fragment) user interface

OGCE

Consortiu m

The OGCE Computing Grid Portal

• Provides Portlets for

– Management of user proxy certificates

– Remote file Management via Grid FTP

– News/Message systems

• for collaborations

– Grid Event/Logging service

– Access to OGSA services

– Access to directory services

– Specialized Application Factory access

• Distributed applications

• Workflow

– Access to Metadata Index tools

• User searchable index

– Real Time

Collaboration

OGCE

Consortiu m

Example Capability: File Management

•

Grid FTP portlet– Allow

User to manage remote

file spaces

–

Uses stored proxy for

authentication

–

Upload and download files

–

Third party file transfer

• Request that GridFTP server A send

a file to GridFTP server B

• Does not involve traffic through

portal server Portal Server User GridFT P Server A GridFT P Server B GridFT Service 1 of many

Education Grids

n

Education Grids

can be considered from at least

two

points of view

n

1)

Exploiting e-Science and other relevant research

government or business grids whose resources can be

adapted for use in education

• Opportunity to make education more “real” and to give

students an idea what scientific research is like

n

2)

Support the virtual organization that is the teacher

and learner community

• Actually this community is heterogeneous with teachers,

learners, parents, employers, publishers, informal education, university staff ….

Education Grid

Inservice Teachers Preservice Teachers School of Education

Teacher Educator Grids Informal Education (Museum) Grid Student/Parent … Community Grid Science Grids Bioinformatics Particle Physics Earth Science …….

Typical Science Gri Service such as Research

Database or simulation Transformed by Grid Filte to form suitable for education

Learning Management

or LMS Grid

Publisher Grid Campus o Enterprise Administrative Grid

Education as a Grid of Grids

Digital Library

Education Grid of Grids

n

Services in an Education Grid

fall into three classes

1) Those that

special to Education

such as

quiz

(as in

IMS), learning plan or grading services

n

2) Those that are important but can be

taken from

other Grids

such as collaboration and security

n

3) Those that come from other Grids and are

refactored for education

• The simulation is reduced in size

• The bioinformatics database interface is simplified

e-Science

Resource Filter Education Grid Viewof e-Science Resource

Database Database

Researc Simulation

s _{Analysis and}

Visualizatio Portal Repositorie Federated Databases Data Filte Services

Field Trip Data

Streaming Data Sensor s

?

What to do?

• Develop a planning grid of interested parties • Grow a teacher and teacher education grid

– This would largely be a community/collaboration Grid

• Develop prototypes such as Quarknet separating science and teaching side into separate grids

– Develop interface/transformational material

• Note we do not try to make a single seamless grid but rather multiple federated grids

– Use bittorrent not GridFTP (or rather transform between them) – Supply education compute resources on demand

– Make a deal with Google for free searches

• Develop the online instruments, databases, web pages, physics-based games, simulations that are science grids with educational transforms – Videos and MP3’s of Scientists in action

• Develop collaborative whiteboards/ video/ imagery/ chats/ white-papers/ experts-on-demand that form a community grid

– Instant Messenger, audio/video conferencing – Content annotation critical

Undergroundfilm.org is/will be a community grid for educational film makers

(run by Community Grids Laboratory) Has viewer evaluation of content

http://www.yafro.com

supports digital camera

images (as on modern cell phones) and builds

Community Grid A/V Conferencing

SIP H323 Access_Grid Native_XGSP

Admire

Gateways convert to uniform XGSP Messaging

High Performance (RTP and XML/SOAP and ..

Media Servers

Filters Session Server

XGSP-based Control

NaradaBrokerin g

All Messaging

Use Multiple Media servers to scale to many codecs and many versions of audio/video mixing

NB Scales a distributed

We Services

Summary

n Grid of Grids interesting way to build “new Grids” that might be

accepted by skeptical participants and enhance re-use

n IMS has set data but not many service standards

• Partial step to interoperability

n Sakai is building modern (probably wonderful) open e-learning

capabilities but appears not to be a Grid/WS standards compliant service architecture

n Current academic/commercial systems are successful but monolithic n Opportunity to build service-based Education Grid Infrastructure

interacting with broad community (from Grids to WS to Schools of Education) exploiting other Grids

n Can build collaboration – A/V Conferencing, Shared applications,

groupware – in Grid/WS architecture

n Critical to build on Community Grids as popularized in P2P networks n Can develop best practice and tools to allow e-Science grids to be linked

to education