Toward an Open Analytics Environment

  • Ian Foster | Argonne National Laboratory & University of Chicago, Computation Institute

(Joint work with Svetlozar Nestorov, Steve Tuecke, and others)

Research and development are becoming increasingly data driven and collaborative. However, taking a systems-level view of the knowledge production process, we find that progress is often hindered by logistical difficulties relating to data access, analysis, discovery, interpretation, and sharing. I argue that many of these difficulties can be overcome by creating an open analytics environment, a hardware +software “cloud” into which teams can load data, programs, and the
like, with analysis driven by both stored procedures and explicit user requests. I review requirements that such an environment should satisfy, and discuss work being performed in the Computation Institute and elsewhere towards this goal.

Speaker Details

Ian Foster is Director of the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, where he is also the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science. His research deals with distributed, parallel, and data- intensive computing technologies; the applications of those technologies to scientific problems; and the mechanisms and policies needed to create and operate scalable scientific “cyberinfrastructures,” or Grids as he likes to call them. Dr. Foster is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the British Computer Society. His awards include the British Computer Society’s award for technical innovation, the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Next Generation award, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal, R&D Magazine’s Innovator of the Year, and DSc Honoris Causa from the University of Canterbury.

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