Three sessions at February's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) dealt with distributed computing infrastructures and their use by scientists worldwide. Following the meeting's theme, Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being, scientists at the sessions discussed the use of Grid technologies and volunteer computing to fight disease, predict earthquake effects and hazardous weather conditions, understand the origins of the universe, and decode our own behaviour.
The goal of the Grid is to bring together resources and people across national and institutional boundaries, and indeed Grids have become a worldwide phenomenon. Speakers at the AAAS included Ruth Pordes, executive director of Open Science Grid (OSG), who introduced one of the sessions; Microsoft's Tony Hey, who presented e-Science in the UK and Europe; and William Chang from the National Science Foundation's Beijing office, who discussed networking and Grid computing in Asia, including the PRAGMA project, which bridges the nations of the Pacific Rim.
The majority of the speakers at the three sessions presented ways that distributed infrastructures are now being used for science. Charlie Catlett, director of TeraGrid, talked about how their distributed infrastructure is exploited, and others presented specific disciplines using Grid infrastructures such as EGEE or OSG. Particle physicist JoAnne Hewett from SLAC discussed potential discoveries in particle physics that might result from the new experiments at the LHC.
While the physical, biological and Earth sciences dominated the applications on display at the three AAAS sessions, the use of Grids for social science also featured. Bennett Bertenthal from Indiana University spoke about the Social Informatics Data Grid, an initiative to help social scientists collaborate and share data, often for the first time.
The use of distributed computing for education was also highlighted. David Anderson, director of the BOINC software platform that enables volunteer computing projects such as SETI@home and climateprediction.net, pointed out that the process people go through to decide which project to donate their computer time to leads them to learn much about current scientific research and the process of science.