[CAnet - news] Science as a web service- XML can supercharge research

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[Excerpts from Technology review as report by Science Grid This week-BSA]

Science Grid This Week is available at:
http://www.interactions.org/sgtw/


http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16461,258,p1.html

Science as a Web Service

XML can supercharge research.

By Craig Mundie

Although my roots before joining Microsoft were in supercomputing, I believe
that "extreme computing" and adding gigaflops (billions of floating-point
operations per second) are no longer the optimal solutions to most
scientific and technical problems. Today, scientists and engineers can buy
or build 10-gigaflop desktop computers for around $5,000, and within the
next several years, we will see similar supercomputing power at the chip
level.

Instead, the next breakthroughs in science and engineering will come from
harnessing the power of software and data -- for example, using low-cost
sensors to collect terabytes of real-world data and using data management
tools to understand it.

Of course, combining computer models and real-world data presents new
challenges, particularly in learning how to store, search, analyze,
visualize, publish, and record the provenance of that data and the resulting
conclusions. I believe the software industry can play a key role in
developing tools that automate these data management tasks.

Such tools are beginning to appear. Inexpensive databases that allow
precious data to be stored in a structured format are readily available but
are significantly underused by the scientific community. Another important
software advancement is XML (the eXtensible Markup Language). XML allows
sensors, services, and systems to easily exchange data. Data formatted with
XML is easier to search, and because metadata is an integral part of XML, it
allows the provenance of the data to be recorded.

XML is also one of the enabling technologies for grid computing and Web
services, which will revolutionize the scientific community in the coming
decade by enabling the free exchange of information across distributed
systems. Remote computation will be directly accessible from any desktop,
and sensors and instruments will have their own Internet addresses.

The immediate challenge for the scientific and engineering community is to
take advantage of available data management and data analysis tools. The
larger and longer-term challenge is for the leaders in academic research to
leverage software and Web services technologies to standardize the way they
present and track their data.

Craig Mundie is Microsoft's chief technology officer for advanced strategies
and policy.


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