A Vision of a Computing Environment for the Web 2.0 Era
Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Existing high-performance and high-throughput computing facilities are currently restricted to elite stake-holders familiar with distributed service infrastructures, programming paradigms, workflow composition systems and their respective security infrastructures. Those less information-technology savvy, are left out of the equation even though they are in great need of different computing infrastructure, sharing resources, collaborating and generating value-added services and knowledge. There is an emergent need for a novel distributed software platform capable of addressing the real-world needs of the scientific and engineering communities and industries by allowing them to exploit distributed resources and solve complex problems through more secure, intuitive and technology-hiding means leveraging both the current networking and advanced computing environments.
Rather then developing a new closed platform solution for providing the above mentioned features the paper examines different existing and emergent technologies [1], including: Web 2.0, cloud computing, grid technology and software as a service. The described end-user scenario focuses on the use of parametric studies in earthquake engineering. The scenario paints a vision for a future computing environment by describing a probabilistic performance assessment of a structure [2] as an example for high-throughput computing environment. The adopted system architecture was selected primarily because it provides a scalable computing solution without the administrative overhead of a local computing cluster, and because it allows users to carry out most of their science with only a web browser.
- [1]
- Gartner, "Gartner Highlights Key Predictions for IT Organisations and Users in 2008 and Beyond", URL, 2008.
- [2]
- M. Dolenc, M. Dolsek, "High-Throughput Computing in Engineering", in M. Papadrakakis, B.H.V. Topping, (Editors), "Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Engineering Computational Technology", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 94, 2008.