I am in Redmond this week and am participating in two workshops being hosted by different groups within Microsoft Research. Along with a handful of others, I was asked to participate in a panel discussion on Friday dealing with new experiences that cloud computing would facilitate, as well as things we felt were road blocks to seeing those experiences realized. He specifically challenged us to think "outside the box" and to look beyond (the now typical) conversations surrounding raw performance and to dream a little. I wrote out the following as a means of working through my thoughts for my 5-7 minute portion of the panel discussion and, as it took me longer than 7 minutes to read, I thought I'd post it here as a expansion of the talk and possibly an anchor on which to hang subsequent conversations. Please forgive the casual nature of the talk as it is intended to be, essentially, a script read delivered to a group rather than a formal written version of the same.
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This topic is certainly interesting to me as I am convinced that cloud computing is here to stay and also presents a platform that can be disruptive to the scientific/technical computing industry (although I would qualify this by saying “disruptive in a constructive sense” – meaning that the disruption leads to the additive good and not the removal of existing work). I have spent a considerable amount of time over the past week contemplating this question (how do we imagine cloud computing facilitating new usage scenarios), and have chosen to present my reply by means of a few examples.
The first example is that of Lego MindStorms. Are you familiar with these? They are kits that provide kids (regardless of how old they are :) ) the ability to build robots using a familiar (although slightly altered) Lego metaphor. These kits come with motors, sensors, and a "brain" that is programmable via a drag-and-drop software tool but also supports more complex tools such as Microsoft's Robotics Studio. Do you know what is so great about these (besides the obvious)? They allow common people, with no prior robotics or electronics experience, to dabble in the field. It is, a gateway, if you will, to a much broader field.
The second example is more of an experience that happened to me recently in that I had the privilege of running into my high school science teacher this past weekend - a quiet, rather unassuming fellow named Randy White. Randy's brilliance is that he has a passion for science and did (at least in my case) an excellent job of transference. If I am ever able to accomplish anything interesting in the scientific domain, a large portion of the credit will lie with him. Probably the most important thing he taught us, was how to think about, or to tackle the complex. I can't tell you how many times I heard him say, "Start with what you know". The idea being, that most often, incredibly complex problems were comprised of nothing more than a series of far simpler, and additive problems. He taught us to focus on solving what we could, rather than attempting to "swallow the entire elephant" if you'll allow me to strain a metaphor.
If you find yourself wondering what these two examples have to do with each other, or more germanely, what do they have to do with my vision for the scenarios that cloud computing will open, let me see if I can explain...
You see, much in the same manner as Lego MindStorms have introduced an otherwise unlikely audience to the world of robotics, I believe that cloud computing (based on its cost model and popular programming paradigms) is a means of introducing normal people (and by this, I mean those not formally trained in scientific or technical computing) to the notion of using computation as a tool for solving complex problems. Possibly to the dismay of some in the field, I think that this will, at least initially be done in a means void of the topics of MPI, or Fortran, much in the same way as a 15 year old "programming" his robot doesn't have to understand the inner workings of concurrency runtimes nor the physics at work when his robot "walks" for the first time. I will be the first to admit that these (MPI, Fortran, concurrency topics, race conditions) are important topics, but I would submit that they should not be gating factors to one's ability to explore the arena and determine if he/she is interested in further study in that field. I think we will see paradigms that are far simpler to adopt, such as master-worker, map/reduce, etc. (or even cloud-backed applications that are hidden behind more accessible tools such as Excel, or MatLab) take hold in significant ways and that we will see the development of novel approaches to solving problems using this new platform. The tired-and-true tools will remain, and will be used when necessary and appropriate, but I think if we force them down the throats of the next generation of researchers as "the only way to accomplish science", we are doing them a great
disservice.
As to where Mr. White and high-school science comes into play - well, this can best be summarized by a comment made by a friend of mine, Wally McClure when he, almost flippantly, referred to Windows Azure as a "poor man's supercomputer". Being one that had been working with Azure for quite a bit at the time, I took a little offense at the accolade due to its semi-pejorative nature, and prefer the "common man", but the point is the same regardless: Cloud Computing (at least as currently manifested in both Windows Azure and Amazon's AWS platform), has a great potential to democratize high-performance computing. You see, the high-school I grew up in was small... we had 23 in my graduating class. While Randy has moved on, he still teaches in a comparatively small school that certainly has no funds for a cluster on which to run experiments. However, with the advances in cloud computing, Randy could devise a collection of simple experiments and actually execute them as part of a class project. He could have a significant computational cluster for the equivalent of a few dollars. He can present "Scientific" computing as something obtainable to his students, and hopefully foster an interest that will develop into the next generation of computational thinkers - solving one problem at a time, incrementally, on the way to solving massive problems that we have trouble even describing today.
It is, in my opinion, incumbent upon us - the current generation of computational researchers and domain-specific scientists - to look at cloud computing not as a threat to the establishment, but as facilitating a new means of scientific discovery. We should consider ways to make large-scale computation more accessible to "normal" people. We should be opening up the community, sharing wherever possible, reducing the barriers to entry. Challenge yourselves and your students to push boundaries, to consider non-traditional approaches, and to enjoy "playing" with computational resources.
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Conferences, Theory, Cloud Computing