White House Mulls NASA / Center for Cloud Computing

White House Mulls NASA / Center for Cloud Computing:

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090724_6498.php?oref=topstory

8th Australian Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing

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8th Australasian Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing
(AusPDC 2010)
Brisbane, Australia, January 18-22, 2010
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~rajivr/auspdc2010/
in conjunction with
Australasian Computer Science Week, 18-22 January 2010
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Overview/Scope:
The 8th Australasian Symposium on Parallel and Distributed (AusPDC 2010) will be held in January, in Brisbane, Australia in conjunction with Australasian Computer Science Week, 18-22 January 2010.

Scope of the Symposium
AusGrid event has been broadened to include all aspects of parallel and distributed computing and hence it will be called as Australasian Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (AusPDC) from 2010. In both New Zealand and Australia parallel and distributed computing has been recognised as strategic technologies for driving their moves towards knowledge economies. A number of projects and initiatives are underway in both countries in these areas. There is a natural interest in tools which support collaboration and access to remote resources given the challenges of the countries location and sparse populations.

Topics of interest for the symposium include but not limited to:
* Multicore
* GPUs and other forms of special purpose processors
* Cluster computing
* Grid computing
* Green computing

* Cloud computing
* Peer-to-peer computing
* Service computing and workflow management
* Managing large distributed data sets
* Middleware and tools
* Performance evaluation and modeling
* Problem-solving environments
* Parallel programming models, languages and compilers
* Runtime systems
* Operating systems
* Resource scheduling and load balancing
* Data mining
* Reliability, security, privacy and dependability
* Applications and e-Science

The symposium is primarily targeted at researchers from Australia and New Zealand, however in the spirit of parallel and distributed computing, which aims to enable collaboration of distributed virtual organizations, we encourage papers and participation from international researchers.

Best Paper Award:
A best paper award sponsored by Manjrasoft Pty. Ltd, Australia will be presented to a paper receiving the highest quality rating. In addition, a special issue in a high quality international journal will be organized for selected best papers.

Program Committee Chairs:
- Jinjun Chen, Swinburne University of Technology
- Rajiv Ranjan, University of Melbourne

Program Committee:
David Abramson, Monash University
Mark Baker, University of Reading, UK
David Bannon, Victoria Partnership for Advanced Computing
Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne
Paul Coddington, University of Adelaide
Neil Gemmell, University of Otago, NZ
Andrzej Goscinski, Deakin University
Kenneth Hawick, Massey University, NZ
John Hine, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
Jane Hunter, University of Queensland
Martin Johnson, Massey University, NZ
Nick Jones, University of Auckland, NZ
Laurent Lefevre, University of Lyon, France
Andrew Lewis, Griffith University
Piyush Maheshwari, Perot Systems
Teo Yong Meng, National University of Singapore
Manish Parashar, Rutgers University, USA
Srikumar Venugopal, University of New South Wales
Yun Yang, Swinburne University of Technology
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--
Dr. Jinjun Chen
Lecturer in Information Technology
CS3 - Centre for Complex Software Systems and Services
Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology,
1, Alfred Street, Hawthorn,
Melbourne, Victoria 3122, Australia.
Tel: +61 3 9214 8739
Fax: +61 3 9819 0823
Office: EN508a, Engineering Building, Hawthorn Campus
Email: jinjun.chen@gmail.com
URL: http://www.swinflow.org/~jchen/

GIPSEPoison getting closer

Today I spent some time playing with GIPSEPoison trying to see if I could invoke the service... it seems I could but I kept getting caught up in classpath issues... first needing to import Dr. Jeremy Espino's CXF client for accessing the NPDS service... and then talking a bit with Brian about how he set up the build scripts to include data (properties files) from a "resources" directory in the classpath. So tomorrow I have a good list of things to tinker-with that will hopefully successfully punt data from npds through GIPSE and to the grid viewer.

Then I need to clean up a bit of the fun javascript logic around the magical autopopulating drop-downs (there are some strange inital load issues).

Otherwise, I have gone ahead and made a service registry entry for gridviewer to help aid people who want to install and set up their own gridviewers. I have also added some database definitions to the database loader project to help aid in geodata creation and described their use in that entry. Right now one needs to build and install the gmap-polygon project before they are able to build and use gridviewer, and it has pointed out to me that it's an annoying step that could probably be replaced with a no-props version of the gridviewer jar... so I am going to look into doing that soon as well.

Cheers,
Peter

Introduce Metadata working.

So, with some help from Dan and Brian, I got GIPSEPoison deployed to my local dev box... and then I pointed grid-viewer to it... and got metadata back in the standard metadata format (which means that I properly imported some of the metadata code Chris already wrote).

Thus, tomorrow will be sorting out the client side of the code and then, hopefully, GIPSEPoison.

Cheers,
Peter

Authentication failed [Caused by: Unknown CA]

This post is in reference to the following Globus Error:

Authentication failed [Caused by: Failure unspecified at GSS-API level [Caused by: Unknown CA]]

This error is generated when the client does not trust the server CA. This error can be corrected by adding the server CA file (.0) to the Globus client's .globus\certificates directory.

This error is also generated when the .0 file is corrupted. You must verify that the md5checksum is correct on both the remote server and local Globus node. Please see the follow link for an example of this procedure.

http://www.globus.org/mail_archive/gt-user/2007/09/msg00103.html

Introduce Quirks

I am noticing a few strange differences between my GIPSEPoison and the GIPSEServices written by Brian and Chris....

First, when I created my project, the prefix that showed up for the service ([service url]/[prefix]/[ServiceName]) was "cagrid" instead of something like "gipse". Brian and I found that the property "service.deployment.prefix" in the deploy.properties file defines the prefix. Might be handy for anyone else who wants to change their service prefix from cagrid.

Another strange thing I have noticed is that my autogenerated code throws "RemoteExceptions" while Brian and Chris' autogenerated code throw "Exceptions"... I am not sure what quirk caused that or why they are different... Perhaps I got a slightly different version of introduce. But, it all compiles together, and I hope that it ends up working.

GIPSE and Introduce.

Greetings all,

As you can see from a few posts below, Brian changed a few of the elements of what used to be the AMDS service into the GIPSE service. Thus, I spent a lot of time modifying grid viewer to attach to GIPSEServices in several of our local installations (and debugging said modifications). But that didn't stop me from playing with Introduce and GIPSEPoison.

I am hoping I did the setup correctly (and many thanks to Brian for helping me and Chris to doing a lot of legwork with the code before me). This time around we are trying to use the same namespaces and packages with the hope that the client generated for the Biosense GIPSEService will work with the NPDS GIPSEService. The hope is that if you want to create a service, and you import the schema from the wiki/sourceforge/ncphi-site and stick to using the same namespace... it should be readable by the gridviewer.

Right now, I have gotten it to the "building but not deployed/tested" phase for the relatively simple metadata query, and I am going to poke it tomorrow to see if grid-viewer can pull the metadata without "this isn't the operation I expected" errors.

Cheers,
Peter

Institute of Medicine meeting to discuss application of grid to HIEs

Institute of Medicine arranged a meeting of 30 experts from computer science, informatics, and the health information exchange community to discuss the applications of grid computing technologies to health information exchange. Read comments form Dr. John Halamka:
http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispatch-from-washington.html

Updated GIPSEService (finally)

I updated the GIPSE BioSense service so that it uses the 6/30 GIPSE data structure draft.

The GIPSEService can read from any jdbc data source and is configurable by editing the db.gipse.table property to point to the view/table name that contains the GIPSE data.

Also note that if you are upgrading your service, but not your data store (still using amds_extract) you should set the following properties in your gipse.properties file:
db.gipse.table=amds_view
db.gipse.table.column.date=date
db.gipse.table.column.state=state
db.gipse.table.column.zip5=zip5
db.gipse.table.column.zip3=zip3
db.gipse.table.column.condition=condition
db.gipse.table.column.classifier=classifier
db.gipse.table.column.count=count

This service is built to share the BioSense aggregate counts using the required stratifiers (date, state/zip5/zip3, indicator, count) so it will not use age, service area / disposition nor facility even though the schema supports these optional stratifiers.

There is a lot of buzz around adding age, so the next version may end up supporting the age optional stratifier with a couple of age groups.

Re-introduce introduce

I managed to fix a few bugs and do a few deployments with grid viewer over the past few days, and it looks like the next thing I get to play with is the GIPSEPoison service... but GIPSEPoison has been built in introduce, and I need to play more with introduce to figure out how those services work and are built and can be modified.

But it will be about the third time I have started to learn introduce. The other two times priorities shifted and I started working on other things... So, perhaps third time is the charm.

I am also going to play a bit with graphics and see if I can plan out concurrent load items.

Cheers!

Client flexibility.

So, one of the little issues that cropped up over the last couple of days is that if you do not really watch how you set up your service in Introduce... there is a very good chance that it will use new packages and namespaces and use an entirely different service in the generated service code.

Right now I am using the client half of the client/server code that was generated by introduce for GIPSE-Biosense. Meanwhile, the client half of the client/server code that was generated by introduce for GIPSE-Poison was different.

Really different. Different packages different.

This means I would have to import both the clients of GIPSE-Poison and GIPSE-Biosense and have logic in my code to differentiate between the servers being called to get data from both... and the idea of having to do that for every service someone wants to generate makes the solution not scalable.

Thus, a big focus over this upcoming week is going to be making a very flexible client. I was chatting with Jeremy about things like Yahoo Pipes and he also just pointed out that the data is XML and I could probably just run things through an XSLT to get data from one point to another... and it was a really good idea. Hopefully, it means that all one would have to do is create an XSLT in case their schema didn't match ours exactly and drop somewhere in the classpath of gridviewer and set a few properties to say "this might need a bit of extra processing" and then gridviewer will be able to display the data.

Also, I am going to be thinking of pinwheels and set-the-URL pushpin styles... but I am not sure if I am going to be able to get to them this week.

Cheers,
- Peter

Got multiple region searches.

Part of the improvements that will hopefully deploy successfully tomorrow is the ability to have multi-region searches.

So, there will be a new button that says "add to current" which, when pressed, will add data without clearing off the old data. This means you can have all the zip3s in Florida post next to all the zip3s in Georgia in case you want to compare between the two.

Currently, there is no way to differentiate between two searches on the same region (so if you select for all the zip3s in Georgia for one condition, and then add all the zip3s in Georgia for another condition... it will just overwrite the first set)... this is going to be part of a suite of improvements that allow for different sorts of pinpoints (pinwheel) and probably for selecting regions and legends.

But, I think it's neat and I hope you will too (and I actually got it working yesterday but spent a lot of yesterday and today debugging it, as I essentially had to rip apart the gmap-polygon project to get it working (and I branched before I did, thank goodness))

Cheers!

GIPSE Store update

I just updated the amds-db project so that it is renamed to gipse-store to update the database structure to support new stratifiers. Now the database structure supports new optional stratifiers of:
age
gender
service area (e.g. ED, Outpatient, Inpatient, etc.)
facility

in addition to the required stratifiers of:
indicator
region (zip5 and/or state)

Note, although the GIPSE store supports these new indicators, the BioSense GIPSE service will still only use the indicator and region stratifiers.

I'm making this change to support storage from the BioSense HIE feeds as well as adding in additional stratifiers that may be used by the CoEs and Regional Collaboratives.

Next up is the change to the AMDSService to rename to GIPSE.

This project has ddl and seed data for PostgreSQL (we use this for dev) and SQLServer (we use this for production). Should anyone require another RDBMS please let me know (or add them yourself).

NHIN Connect 2.1 is in the lab

NHIN 2.1 is fully functional in the lab on a single VM. I like it. It is much nicer than the 2.0 version.

Testing is underway!

A cool little service registry example

I came across the Mebrane SOA Registry yesterday and thought it was a good example of a really lean service registry that is highly functional. It has basic publish/search capability, but I like how it integrates clients for testing services (you can call from the web site) and also digg like behavior of letting users rate services.

This matches a lot of the rhetorics PHGrid has been talking about.

Unfortunately, the source code isn't released yet (they plan to later this year) but I like how this is a thin response to the usually pretty weighty chunk of software for registries.

It also has a really nice little generic SOAP client for testing public services that I find useful for when I don't have soapui installed on a machine. Comes in handy with the NHIN CONNECT test cases.

Hot off the press: Google Plans to Introduce a PC Operating System

Check out this NY Times article here

multisets

Gmap Polygon and Grid Viewer are now essentially doing cumulative searches... it's just not displaying them in any particular order... Thus tomorrow will be spent creating some updated pinpoint libraries (pinwheel), modifying the flot-plot screens, adding a "clear map" function... and filtering to make sure that empty data sets aren't added.

Also, there is a distinction for "empty set". If servers are queried and no data comes back, I'll show the pinpoints/polygons as empty. If, however, a search is run without any servers selected.... it will be considered an empty set and not added to the search tree.

Thus, when you first load the page, you'll get a map of the US, but there will be no pinpoints until you actually search for data. This behavior can change, of course, but for now it will help debug the behavior of how data is added.

Then, it's testing to see how it all behaves, and seeing whether a collection of collections will suffice or whether I will have to upgrade it to a map of some sort (a bit more complex to navigate, but probably much better "make sure these are in order" behavior)

HPCCloud FYI

Got this off the gt_users mailing list and thought it may be of interest:

http://groups.google.com/group/HPCcloud

A group dedicated to high performance cloud and grid computing.

Enterprise...

So, I was chatting with a friend yesterday and indicated that I was a bit sad because the next set of changes (modifying GmapPolygon to hold multiple sets of polygons/indicators and writing a new polygon color handler that allows for URL's to be set) will sort of make things ugly and a bit more confusing and threatens to mottle the design patterns even more...

The friend spake (and I paraphrase): "Don't worry about it, it's enterprise code. You go in expecting A... and you end up making A, which eventually needs B after the user sees it and decides it wants B-esque features... but you don't have the time to completely remake it into B, so you make it into a mashup of A and C which works just as good but is not as pretty. So just be happy that A-C is doing good enough and make it into B if you have time before the next deadline." We then went on to discuss how the whole idea that code as a start-do-end thing is more myth than reality... as specifications change and user wishes change and sometimes you change from linux to windows or the tool you need only works with a certain version &c &c.

So yes, The next step is going to be changing the GmapPolygon and the Grid Viewer to work with indexed collections of polygons instead of just one collection of polygons. This will allow for sequential searches (search for all the fever in the US... now search for all the nausea in the US... now search for all the poison-related cellulitis in the US... now do those again for all of Texas...) to be maintained and shown simultaneously on the map until they are explicitly cleared. This means the pinpoint visualizations will need to be changed so that later searches don't show up on top of the older searches (right now I am thinking of using rotating pins... so sequential searches start filling in a pin-wheel). The flot-plotting mechanics are also going to need to change a bit to search on region type, name, and index (thus, it knows to look for the 3rd search or the 2nd search). Eventually the selection mechanisms might also be tweaked to become more intuitive or allow for more specific searches... but right now it's just about getting multiple searches on a map.

I'm sure it will actually not be as ugly or unintuitive as I fear when I'm done, but it is a lot of changes in the name of niftiness,

Cheers!

New NHIN Connect 2.1 released - initial feedback

Officially, the new release of the NHIN Connect software comes out tomorrow. Unofficially, it was located on the NHIN Connect web site on July 2nd. The release home is located at http://www.connectopensource.org/display/NHINR21/Release+2.1+Home even though this folder isn't in the main menu system at the time of this blog entry.

Here are some of the highlights:

1 - NHIN Adapter and Connector are now distributed as ONE pre-configured set-up. No more TWO-box solutions. ONE-box only!

2 - Documentation has been greatly improved. It isn't flawless, but it is definitely better.

For my next trick, I will be installing a NEW adapter+connector in the lab from scratch on a new VM to see a) how the install goes, but also b) how well the new adapter+connector system functions.

More to come...

3. Authentication (To Chris' Point)

Chris wrote:

The application currently does session based authentication. We could potentially look to Spring for handling authentication. We would gain persistence (remember me), an adaptor for authenticating with OpenID, LDAP, and an easier path to cross-domain authentication if that were to become a requirement in the future. Spring-Security (formerly ACEGI) also supports X.509 certificates.

Our thinking behind grid/globus is to use their authentication framework rather than creating our own, especially leveraging GAARDS (caGRID). Perhaps we need to reconsider this assumption based upon what's happening at ONC and upon our experience to date.

Team, please comment.

Enabling and disabling servers.

I spent most of last week ironing out some of the ways that the server disabling and enabling will work.

Thus, as servers get added, if they only have some regions, or (more likely) completely different classifiers and indicators... the drop-downs should change and servers should become enabled or disabled.

Otherwise, tomorrow and next week are going to be a paradigm shift... namely the ability to cumulatively add searches with different indicators, thus being able to see differences in data.

Draft GIPSE Element Description now available

A first draft version of the GIPSE (Geocoded Interoperable Population Summary Exchange) "data dictionary" is now available.

Link here

Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.

-Tom

HealthGrid Berlin Update

Hello.

This is Ken Hall from HealthGrid in Berlin.

You can read and virtually experience the conference at http://gridtalk-project.blogspot.com/.

There is good US participation...

Rich Tsui, University of Pittsburgh
Julio Facelli, University of Utah
Muzna Mirza, CDC (NCPHI)

Mary Kratz, HealthGrid.US
Jonathan Silverstein, HealthGrid. US
Howard Bilofsky, HealthGrid.US
Carl Kesselman, USC
Edwina Barnett, Jackson State University
Raphael Isokpetl, Jackson State University