Technology and Collaboration: Researching the development and use of Grid infrastructure for the CERN particle accelerator laboratory.

Dr Will Venters & Dr Yingqin Zheng

www.pegasusresearch.org.uk

Information Systems Group

Three year project funded by the EPSRC programme: “Usability challenges from e-science” (EP/D049954/1)

A research in progress!

Members: Dr Will Venters (Lecturer & PI – LSE) Dr Tony Cornford (Senior Lecturer – LSE) Dr Mark Lancaster (Senior Lecturer in PP – UCL) Dr Yingqin Zheng (Research Officer -LSE) Avgousta Kyriakidou (PhD student -LSE)

Advisory Group: Prof. Tony Doyle, Prof. Steve Lloyd,

Dr Elaine Ferneley, Prof. Wanda Orlikowski, Dr Susan Scott,

The Pegasus Team

Yingqin

TonyWill

Avgousta

Mark

Who are they? Particle Physics sees itself as an elite.

“Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable.” (Guardian)

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting” (Rutherford 1962)

“Promethean heroes of the search for the truth… They bring news of another world.. the extraordinary scale and costliness of much physics research if anything reinforces its cultural value.” (Traweek 1988)

“The culture is built on beliefs in individual genius and outstanding performance that are not (and, in the physicists’ view should not be) in reach of every physicist” (Traweek 1988)

Collaboration: “The group leader doesn’t get to say what to do”, “Socialist”, ”federation”, ”club”, “meritocracy”.

Physics has a globalised working practices, mediated by a travelling culture (Merz 2006)

Advanced Users: Particle Physicists Currently constructing the worlds most

powerful particle accelerator… the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

~100,000,000 electronic channels

800,000,000 proton-proton interactions per second.

Searching for Higgs Boson – “1 person in 1000 worlds, or 1 needle in 20 million haystacks”

Unprecedented amount of data from the LHC (12-14 million gigabytes) (1% of all info!)

(Ex-)Concorde(15 km)

CD stack with1 year LHC data(~ 20 km)

PP and Computing Envisage requiring 100,000 machines (processors)

working together as a “supercomputer” by 2008.

Historically successful at pragmatic use of new technology (Web, Cray, Open-source, farms).

“Particle physics has always pushed the bounds of computing. I mean I’m the guy who sort of pushed the first networks which was really; the first use of the Internet.”

“Particle physics has never failed because of computing”

Highly collaborative working practices (Knorr-Cetina 1999) with few formal lines of authority.

So I think if Ian [Foster] hadn’t created the concept of the grid it would have been invented here anyway. We may not have tried to match it to a paradigm and called it the same, but it would have had to have been invented because we have to use all these machines.

The LHC grid and GridPP 19 UK institutes. £33m (2001-7) GridPP runs

around 10,000 nodes.

3000 ‘users’ Tier Architecture

Grids: Hype or the next big thing? “Overturn strategic and operating

assumptions, alter industrial economics, upset markets (…) pose daunting challenges for every user and vendor” (Carr, 2005)

“Provide the electronic foundation for a global society in business, government, research, science and entertainment” (Berman, 2003)

“Potentially the same social impact as railroads” (Smarr 2004)

“Nothing New” and “plenty of confusion” (Gentzsch, 2002)

Grids: Technology Emerging platform for coordinated

resource sharing and problem solving on a global scale for data-intensive and compute-intensive applications (Foster, 2001)

As Internet protocols enable the sharing and integration of information on the Web, so Grid protocols aim to allow the integration of … sensors, applications, data-storage, computer processors and most other IT resources (Wladawsky-Berger, 2004)

Centred around standard protocols and middleware.

1: No central control.

2: Standard open protocols.

3: Non-trivial level of service.

Experiment layer

Application Middleware

Grid Middleware

Facilities and Fabrics

Grids: Collaboration “Coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic,

multi-institutional virtual organizations" (Foster, 2001)

… which “enable disparate groups of organisations and/or individuals to share resources in a controlled fashion, so that members may collaborate to achieve a shared goal” (Foster, 2001)

“E-science is about global collaboration in key areas… will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken” (John Taylor)

It is politics rather than technology which will inhibit grids (Orzech 2003)

Pegasus Research

Social science research on Grid

Our Research Focus

Preliminary Findings

Emerging themes

Related Research on E-science

Institutional infrastructures for e-Science (David and Spencer 2003)

Access to research data and data sharing (Wouters and Schroeder 2003)

The influence of different knowledge domains on the appropriation of grid technology (Fry and Thelwall 2006)

The construction of users along two discursive repertoires (Jacobs and Steyaert 2006)

Functional efficiency

Communal collaboration

Research Objectives

To understand the evolving Grid as integrated practices “to do science” and of “doing science”.

To reflect and theorize innovative approaches to infrastructure development, as contrasted with traditional approaches

To disseminate the experiences of early Grid adopters to academic, scientific, political, and industrial audiences, as well as the general public.

Research Questions

How the specific needs of the LHC become translated into GridPP, both in the technical and organizational sense;

How are working practices of particle physics inscribed into the technology, and dictate how the grid is developed;

How is the Grid used by particle physicists to do their scientific work;

How does the Grid (actual and potential) come to influence the work of particle physicists for the LHC.

To explore “actions to science” alongside “actions of doing science”

Grid technology for PP

Particle Physics

LHC & experiments

requirements

requirements

practices

use

Methodology

Grid Developers

(middleware)

Grid Deployment

(GridPP)

Grid Users

(Actual and potential)

•Interviews•WLCG Collaboration Meeting

•Interviews

•Observing

Virtual Meetings

•Attending

GridPP

Collaboration

meetings

•Mailing lists

•Wiki

•Interviews•Online Work Diary

30+ interviews, transcribed.

Data analysis using Atlas.ti

Preliminary Findings

LCG/GridPP

“It will work because it’s got to work.”

Truth of universe

physics

LHC

Resources

InstitutesWorldwide LCG collaboration

competence

Computing successes “The way we work”

large scale collaboration

Distributed cognition

Trust

common goalpragmatism

“Communitarian ontology”

Nobel prize

“Contests of unfolding”

Bottom-up

Relevant Concepts Collective mind (Weick) Inscription and translation Artful integration (Suchman 2002)

“cultural production of new forms of material practice.”

“the continued existence of hybrid systems composed of heterogeneous devices.”

Objectual practices (Knorr-Cetina 2001) notion of practice that is more dynamic, creative, and

constructive than the current definition of practice as rule-based routines or embodied skills suggests.

Technology emergent in contests of unfolding (Knorr-Cetina 1999)

Your feedback and suggestions please!