PRAGMA Futures Panel

Philip Papadopoulos, UCSD

All Opinions are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of my university, the US government or my cat

Technology: What are the future trends in areas of cloud (compute and data), sensing (remote and land based), visualization, and networking?

Where does PRAGMA have an advantage? Are there other technologies? Are there activities we should stop doing?

Predictions (5 year timeline) External networks are not significantly faster than

today, but working data sets are O(10X) larger Bandwidth to Remote (and local) storage even more

important Locally-owned an operated Linux clusters decline in

numbers More computational science performed on virtualized

resources Performance gap of virtual vs. physical essentially

eliminated.

Predictions Continued

Exascale computing dominates $$ and community But fewer than 5 applications actually show

demonstrated requirement of real exascale resources Android capability rivals full linux of 10 years ago

Phones and Pads become the “new cluster” nodes (very low power)

Adhoc computing Matching computational capacity to data still is the

#1 issue.

What Can PRAGMA Do?

Real Scientific Applications require complex SW environments We should continue/enhance our focus on simplify deployment of

applications (Virtualization is Good!) We should be doing “expeditions” in deploying application

environments (discover what is needed practically – VM registry, Identity Management, VM Placement, ...)

Embrace and adopt Android As base OS for sensors … From Keynote this morning: how to get all people distributed to be

“looking at the same map in the same room” As a group, can focus on accessibility of infrastructure to application

scientists Control and define your infrastructure --- but for mortals not IT gurus

How do we sustain activity of or allow natural ebb and flow of members? Also, thinking in terms of fulfilling some of the visions, are there other institutions or communities (e.g., computer science, biodiversity) we

should recruit into PRAGMA?

Cannot lose one of basic tenets. PRAGMA is pragmatic! First and foremost, people need to be willing to work together.

Realize that there is necessity of long-term people stability (we old folks) and new energy (you young folks!). But people need to be part of PRAGMA because it is useful to them

(and fun! And good company!) Like our application expeditions, we should actively seek new

areas to Diversify our application pool Keep things interesting

We need to do a better job of bring the infrastructure to applications (I think virtualization makes that process much more practical than Grid)