1,721,000 research outputs found
The Computing Universe: A Journey Through a Revolution
No full textComputers now impact almost every aspect of our lives, from our social interactions to the safety and performance of our cars. How did this happen in such a short time? And this is just the beginning… In this book, Tony Hey and Gyuri Pápay lead us on a journey from the early days of computers in the 1930s to the cutting-edge research of the present day that will shape computing in the coming decades. Along the way, they explain the ideas behind hardware, software, algorithms, Moore's Law, the birth of the personal computer, the Internet and the Web, the Turing Test, Jeopardy's Watson, World of Warcraft, spyware, Google, Facebook, and quantum computing. This book also introduces the fascinating cast of dreamers and inventors who brought these great technological developments into every corner of the modern world. This exciting and accessible introduction will open up the universe of computing to anyone who has ever wondered where his or her smartphone came from.<br/
e-Science and its implications
No full textAfter a definition of e-science and the Grid, the paper begins with an overview of the technological context of Grid developments. NASA’s Information Power Grid is described as an early example of a ‘prototype production Grid’. The discussion of e-science and the Grid is then set in the context of the UK e-Science Programme and is illustrated with reference to some UK e-science projects in science, engineering and medicine. The Open Standards approach to Grid middleware adopted by the community in the Global Grid Forum is described and compared with community based standardization processes used for the Internet, MPI, Linux and the Web. Some implications of the imminent data deluge that will arise from the new generation of e-science experiments in terms of archiving and curation are then considered. The paper concludes with remarks about social and technological issues posed by Grid enabled ‘collaboratories’ in both scientific and commercial contexts
Einstein's Mirror
No full textLavishly illustrated, fascinating and accessible introduction to Einstein's relativity for general readers, school students and undergraduates
Cyberinfrastructure for e-Science
No full textHere we describe the requirements of an e-Infrastructure to enable faster, better, and different scientific research capabilities. We use two application exemplars taken from the United Kingdom’s e-Science Programme to illustrate these requirements and make the case for a service-oriented infrastructure. We provide a brief overview of the UK ‘‘plug-and-play composable services’’ vision and the role of semantics in such an e-Infrastructure
AI3SD Video: AI for Science: Transforming Scientific Research
No full textThere is now broad recognition within the scientific community that the ongoing deluge of scientific data is fundamentally transforming academic research. Turing Award winner Jim Gray referred to this revolution as “The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery’. Researchers now need tools and technologies to manipulate, analyze, visualize, and manage vast amounts of research data. This talk will begin by reviewing the challenges posed by the explosive growth of experimental and observational data generated by large-scale facilities such as the Diamond Synchrotron and the CryoEM Facilities at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Increasingly, scientists are beginning to use sophisticated machine learning and other AI technologies both to automate parts of the data pipeline and also to find new scientific discoveries in the deluge of experimental data. In particular, ‘Deep Learning’ neural networks have already transformed several areas of computer science and research scientists are now exploring their use in analyzing their ‘Big Scientific Data’. The talk concludes with a vision of how this ‘AI for Science’ agenda can be truly transformative for experimental scientific discovery
Academic information management: an open linking approach
No full textThis paper describes a Web based document management system developed as a Lotus Domino application and the continuing research work of providing users with a variety of link services and agents that enhance the basic content of the system. The system is designed for use by administration personnel in an academic environment taking into account the wide variety of systems and methods already in use. Users do not need to know how to author Web pages as the source material for the system are files produced by common word processors. The system features a number of management tools to complement this concept written into the Domino application. The document management system is complemented by the use of an open linking service to dynamically cross-reference the documents
Humans of AI3SD: Tony Hey
No full textThis interview forms part of our Humans of AI3SD Series.In this Humans of AI4SD interview he discusses his long career, converting scientists to Microsoft’s tools, the two dramatic developments in the past 10 years, the role of commercial cloud resources, advice for early career researchers, and much more. .
The Role of Performance Engineering Techniques in the Context of the Grid
No full textPerformance engineering can be described as a collection of techniques and methodologies whose aim is to provide reliable prediction, measurement and validation of the performance of applications on a variety of computing platforms. This paper reviews techniques for performance estimation and performance engineering developed at the University of Southampton and presents application case studies in task scheduling for engineering meta-applications, and capacity engineering for a financial transaction processing system. These show that it is important to describe performance in terms of a resource model, and that the choice of models may have to trade accuracy for utility in addressing the operational issues. We then present work from the on-going EU funded Grid project GRIA, and show how lessons learned from the earlier work have been applied to support a viable business model for Grid service delivery to a specified quality of service level. The key in this case is to accept the limitations of performance estimation methods, and design business models that take these limitations into account rather than attempting to provide hard guarantees over performance. We conclude by identifying some of the key lessons learned in the course of our work over many years and suggest possible directions for future investigations
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