Keynote Speakers

Keith Jeffery

Director IT and International Strategy of Science and Technology Facilities Council, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
GRIDS, CLOUDs, Web2.0: New Challenges for Informatics
Abstract:
GRIDs, CLOUDs and Web2.0 all offer exciting possibilities. These new technologies are discussed. However, none yet overcome some of the existing outstanding problems in informatics, and indeed they raise new problems. How do we maintain the concept of state, integrity and ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transactions in a world with millions of nodes, very fast streams of data from detectors and worldwide update, retrieval and processing of data? How do local policies of security, privacy and integrity affect massive systems of heterogeneous nodes? How do we maintain security and privacy across such dynamic systems? Can we build trust systems applicable to today's environment? It is noticeable that over the last 20 years storage systems have improved speeds, capacities and notably a cost per unit of around 10**18; processor power has improved by around 10**15 but wide area telecommunications by only around 10**4. This poses problems for system designers. Similarly the very high cost of software production and maintenance will only become greater unless we change the model. A way forward is proposed based on SOKU (Service-Oriented Knowledge Utilities).
Bio:
Keith Jeffery is currently Director IT and International Strategy of STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council), based at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK. Previously he was Director IT and Head of Business and Information Technology Department (15m€ p.a. turnover, 140 staff, 1100 servers, 360,000 users) providing services to STFC, national services to the UK academic community and undertaking research and development projects funded by the UK Research Councils, government departments, the European Commission and commerce and industry internationally.
Keith has extensive experience in consultancy, project management and product development both within the public sector and the commercial sector. He has been involved actively in EC-funded projects as reviewer, coordinator, system architect and in technical and exploitation roles. He was editor-in-chief and later chairman for the Next Generation GRIDs expert group of the EC and is moderator for the CLOUDs expert group.
Previous positions included running a Division for Information Systems Engineering, leading a database and office systems service group, running a group using computing for environmental science data storage, retrieval, analysis and modelling, and leading a team providing a computing service to the UK Geological Survey.
Keith holds a BSc in Geology, a PhD in Geology (with a very large computing content!) and is a Fellow of both the Geological Society of London and the British Computer Society. He is a Chartered Engineer and Chartered IT Professional. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Irish Computer Society. He is a trustee emeritus (past secretary and vice-president) of the Endowment Board of the VLDB (Very Large Database) Conference, and is a member of the boards controlling the EDBT (Extending Database Technology) conference, CAiSE (Conference on Advanced Systems Engineering) and OOIS (Object-Oriented Information Systems) conference. He is a member of the SOFSEM Steering Committee. He is president of euroCRIS and president of ERCIM. He serves on several programme committees for international and national conferences, he reviews material for journals and books and reviews research proposals for several countries. He has numerous publications in refereed journals, books and conference proceedings. He holds the positions of Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Cardiff University, Honorary Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic .

Joe Mambretti

International Center for Advanced Internet Research, Northwestern University (iCAIR.org), Metropolitan Research and Education Network
Designing 21st Century Communications: Architecture, Services, Technology, and Facilities
Abstract
Increasing demand for new applications and services, continual technology innovation, and rapidly changing economics are motivating a substantially new architecture for 21st century digital communications. The traditional architectural model for communications has been oriented toward meeting the exacting requirements of a finite set of well-defined services, essentially, a fixed set of modalities, with known parameters. Consequently, this infrastructure has become a restrictive, barrier to the deployment of new and enhanced capabilities. Meeting the many requirement challenges of on-going change requires replacing traditional designs with those that are significantly more innovative. Often, advances in networking are measured only by increased capacity, and certainly substantially more capacity is required. Fortunately, advanced optical technologies are supporting 100 Gbps and higher capabilities. However, high capacity does not guarantee high performance, and high performance alone does not guarantee required flexibility and determinism. Today, new types of digital communications infrastructure are being designed, prototyped, and provisioned in early implementations. These new design provide for a foundation infrastructure consisting of discoverable, reconfigurable resources that can be dynamically integrated and used. This infrastructure can be considered a programmable platform that can support many more services than traditional deployments, including highly differentiated and deterministic services. This approach enables the design, provisioning, and customization of an unlimited number of services. This design provides for a large scale, distributed facility -- essentially a highly distributed environment, within which it is possible to create many different networks, each with distinctive characteristics, and each capable of many individualized services. This design can be used to create flexible infrastructure foundations, or platforms, that can be major catalysts for innovation, enabling new communication services that cannot be implemented on traditional systems. This new architecture is already emerging from research labs and is beginning to be implemented within metro, national, and international prototype facilities. These facilities are being used to demonstrate a wide spectrum of innovative, high performance large-scale applications, advanced data services, and specialized networks. Examples of early implementations consist of innovative high performance Grid networks, Cloud networks, science research networks, digital media networks, and extremely large scale high performance computing networks.
Bio:
Joel Mambretti is Director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, which is focused on developing digital communications for the 21st Century. The Center, which was created in partnership with a number of major high tech corporations (www.icair.org), designs and implements large scale infrastructure and applications (metro, regional, national, and global). He is also Director of the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN, http://www.mren.org), an advanced high-performance network interlinking organizations in seven upper-midwest states. MREN, which designed and developed the world's first GigaPOP. With its research partners, iCAIR has established several major testbeds, such as OMNInet, to develop new architecture and technology for dynamically provisioned communication services and networks, including those based on lightpath switching. iCAIR has partnered with the Electronic Visualization Lab of the Universityof Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to create StarLight (www.startap.net/starlight) an advanced global communications exchange based on leading-edge optical technologies in Chicago. He is one of the PIs of the national TeraFlow Network, which is supporting, in partnership with the National Center for Data Mining at UIC, a national Open Cloud testbed, funded by the National Science Foundation. He is a Co-Director of the Open Cloud Consortium, a member of the executive committee of I-WIRE (a state-wide optical research network in the Illinois), a founding member of the Global Integrated Lambda Facility, a world wide distributed optical communications infrastructure, a member of Chicago's Council of Technology Advisors (MCTA), and Co-Chair of the Illinois Broadband Deployment Council's Committee on Infrastructure. He has been a member of numerous committees, projects, and initiatives directed at shaping national, state, local and international communications policy related to large-scale communications infrastructure. He has served on the advisory boards of major technology corporations, and he is a frequent speaker at national and international communications technology forums. He has published multiple articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Among his publications are two co-authored books published by Wiley, "Next Generation Internet," and "Grid Networks: Enabling Grids with Advanced Communication Technology."