The U.S. Dept. of Energy's Office of Science is a major funder of physical science research in the US, and the primary funder in several areas such as high energy physics.
As scientific experiments get larger and more expensive, the size and scope of the associated collaboration communities increases. Supporting the analysis of scientific data from such experiments requires data management and analysis of massive amounts of data making use of compute and storage resources that are distributed in laboratories and universities all over the world. Increasingly such systems are being built using Grid/Web Services style Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) frameworks.
For this to be successful in the highly distributed, data intensive science environment, the service components must have predictable, capable, and reliable communication: That is, the network must become another service element that can by integrated into SOA-like systems. This requires that networks provide new transport and security mechanisms, highly capable monitoring, etc., all of which are available as
William E. Johnston is a Senior Scientist and Dept. Head of the US Dept. of Energy, Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) (www.es.net) in the Computational Research Division of the Computing Sciences Directorate of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
His long time research interests include high-speed, wide area network based, distributed systems, widely distributed computational and data "Grids," Public-Key Infrastructure based security and authorization systems, and use of the global Internet to enable remote access to scientific, analytical, and medical instrumentation.
Recent professional activities have included Dept. Head of the Distributed Systems Dept. in the Computational Research Division, and Principal Investigator for several US Dept. of Energy, Office of Science projects related to these topics. He is also co-founder (with Ian Foster and Charlie Catlett) of the Grid Forum (which merged with the European Grid Forum to form the Global Grid Forum, and has since merged with the equivalent industry group to become the Open Grid Forum).
Mr. Johnston has worked in the field of computing for more than 35 years, and has taught computer science at the under graduate and graduate levels. He has a Masters Degree in Mathematics and Physics from San Francisco State University. He may be reached at wej@es.net.
For more information see www.dsd.lbl.gov/~wej.
