Massively Parallel Collaboration

The face of science is changing as more and more experiments are moved out of the lab and onto the Grid. As the number of processors available for computation increases, scientists are able to simulate physical phenomena with higher spatial and temporal resolutions. But what is to become of all the data produced by computational Grids around the world? While much effort has been put into parallelization of computations for generating scientific data, there is much work left to be done on the other side of the fence where the data is analyzed.

Along with science, the rest of the world is changing, too. The Internet is becoming more dynamic than ever (see my Web 2.0 post) and the Web has become the place for social interactions. Folks such as James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” have noticed the power and intelligence of large groups that–given the right set of circumstances–are able to solve problems, make decisions, and even predict the future much more accurately than an individual could.

You need not look far to find examples of the wisdom of crowds on the Web. A fairly obvious one is Wikipedia. This site is enormously popular for finding information about just about any topic, but it is not centrally maintained like a traditional encyclopedia. In fact, anyone can edit an entry as they please. And, maybe surprisingly, the result of thousands of people contributing in their own independent, unsupervised way is a very useful resource! Other sites such as Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, and Facebook also show the trend toward online collaboration of literally millions of people.

The question for e-science is: how do we leverage this technological and cultural trend toward massive collaboration? One possibility is to move much of the scientific analysis done by individual scientists out into Web space. As it stands today, the steps required to find some new trend in the data or some interesting plot are almost always done by a single scientists working at his own machine. The final results are published in a scientific journal, or presented at a conference for many to see, but by and large, the analysis itself is done by an individual or a very small group of individuals.

There is another way to think about scientific analysis. Consider a recent site I stumbled upon called Many Eyes. The idea of the site is simple: you upload your own data (in tabular format) and it can be visualized by anyone on the web using a large number of visualization types (bar chart, scatterplot, world map, pie chart, etc.). According to the Many Eyes website, the goal of the site is to “bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns… to ‘democratize’ visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.”

Check it out. Here are two examples of visualizations that I was able to create in a matter of minutes. The first one shows the number and total valuation of residential building permits issued for Boulder, Colorado from 1993 to 2003. This visualization uses a standard bar chart.

The second visualization is a tag cloud of all the content currently on my blog.

Once a dataset is uploaded, it is public. Users can view existing visualizations of datasets (like the ones I created) or they can create entirely new visualizations. The philosophy of Many Eyes is that you can tap into the “wisdom of crowds” by allowing many people to create their own kinds of visualizations of the same dataset. Users can elect to “watch” datasets or visualizations to be notified of new activity. Additionally, users can post public comments about datasets and visualizations.

Can this type of massively parallel collaboration be harnessed for sophisticated scientific analyses? I think so, and I think this is where we are heading. I had a conversation today with two students attending the Numerical Techniques for Global Atmospheric Models workshop at NCAR. When I proposed to them the idea of social scientific data analysis, they were very interested. In particular, I explained to them the Many Eyes concept and asked if such a site would be useful to atmospheric modelers if the site supported netCDF (a popular data format for atmospheric data) and more sophisticated visualizations. They agreed that such a site would be helpful if it could actually work over the Web. One of the students commented that a big win for such a site would be the ability for scientists to easily find and repeat the post-processing steps of another scientist. (See the El Nino scenario here.)

Surely, many questions remain to be answered. Will the Web infrastructure support sophisticated scientific analyses? Does the sheer size of datasets prevent scientists from working in online Web spaces? What are the cultural impacts of massively parallel collaborations? Would scientists even care to participate for fear of someone else “stealing” their discoveries?

At the end of the day, though, it is clear that the Web has enabled a whole new level of socialization and collaboration that was previously impossible. It’s up to us to determine whether science will embrace this new cultural shift and embrace the “wisdom of crowds.”

What does Web 2.0 mean for e-science?

First, let me define a few terms up front. By “Web 2.0,” I mean the evolution of the Web from relatively static pages, to highly responsive, dynamic online applications and the resulting changes in Web culture. There is some disagreement about why Web 2.0 has arrived now, but one thing many folks point to is the maturity of technologies for making web sites act more like regular applications. AJAX is certainly a player here, along with DHTML and sophisticated GUI toolkits such as Yahoo’s YUI. The result is a more interactive, collaborative, and dynamic Web (as evidenced by the recent extreme success of social networking sites). While I do not argue that technological advances are the only players leading to the advent of Web 2.0, I doubt many will argue that it is not a fundamental part.

By “e-science,” I mean networks of scientists in a community (or even cross-community) using highly advanced computing techniques (such a Grid computing) to accomplish the tasks of scientific research. An overwhelmingly large number of scientific communities have leveraged recent advances in network speed, processor speed, data storage, etc. to help them accomplish their research. For a few examples, see some of the following sites:

• US National Virtual Observatory
• Grid Physics Network
• Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation
• Earth System Grid

The question I want to consider is: “What does Web 2.0 mean for e-science?” My hypothesis is that there is a nice marriage between the two, although most e-science communities have yet to embrace Web 2.0. My argument is simply that science by nature is collaborative and therefore we should be building tools that facilitate collaboration among scientists.

As a first step in this direction, we have seen many scientific communities that have made very large repositories of datasets available online. Many of these can be freely downloaded by anyone in the world for their own personal exploration (or at least to a very large audience of registered users). Of the sites listed above, the only one I have personal experience with is the Earth System Grid. From ESG you can access the datasets used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their latest assessment report.

Similar things are happening in other domains. For example, you no longer have to have a telescope to take a peek at points in the sky. The US Virtual Observatory DataScope application allows you to input a particular point or region and with a simple mouse click you are looking at the requested location!

While I admit that this trend toward more accessibility of data is a huge step forward, I think that applying the Web 2.0 philosophy to e-science may help to increase interactivity by moving some of the “science” that happens on individual machines out into online collaborative spaces. For example, consider this scenario presented to me by a colleague of mine working in the climate modeling domain. He pointed out that many analysts download datasets to study the effects of El Nino. Once a dataset is retrieved (from a site like ESG) it must undergo a series of processing steps to isolate the correct region of the globe, the right time periods, and the right variables. What’s not surprising is that much of the same processing is repeated by every analyst that downloads the dataset. That’s because once you have the dataset locally, it has lost all connections with the site where you found it.

Now imagine a scenario where much of the processing has been moved onto the Web (perhaps by a set of Web Services for climate data?). When scientist B visits the site for her El Nino exploration, she finds that scientist A has already performed much of the needed post processing and she grabs that dataset instead of the original. She also notices some comments made by the scientist A that the El Nino phenomenon is best seen during a certain year. Finally, scientist A has posted some plots that scientist B compares with her own plots.

So, in conclusion it seems that Web 2.0 philosophy and e-science could be good friends. It may be a few years in the making, but when it happens science will benefit from a whole new level of interactivity and collaboration that was previously not possible.