Computational biology is an important, rapidly growing area
of deep computing. The protein folding problem is one of the most
intriguing problems - how does a protein form a three dimensional
structure when it is placed in water? Modeling this
process goes far beyond the capabilities of current supercomputers. I
will discuss the problem as well as different solution approaches currently
being tried. I will also discuss a project called Blue Gene which will
build a petaflop scale supercomputer suitable for one approach to this
problem within the next three years.
In both e-business and e-science, we often need to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic "virtual organizations" formed from the disparate resources within a single enterprise and/or via external resource sharing and service provider relationships. This integration can be technically challenging due to the need to achieve various qualities of service when running on top of different native platforms. We present an Open Grid Services Architecture that addresses these challenges. Building on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, this architecture defines a uniform exposed service semantics (the Grid service); defines standard mechanisms for creating and discovering transient Grid service instances; provides location transparency and multiple binding protocols for service instances; and supports mapping services for integration with underlying native platform facilities. The Open Grid Service Architecture defines, in terms of Web Services Description Language interfaces, mechanisms required for creating and composing sophisticated distributed systems, including lifetime management, reliable remote invocation, change management, credential management, and notification. Our presentation describes how Globus Toolkit mechanisms can be used to implement a service oriented architecture, explains how Grid functionality can be incorporated into a Web services framework, and illustrates how our architecture can be applied as a basis for distributed system integration--within and across organizational domains.