The coupling between a continuous decrease in the cost performance ratio of hardware and an unprecedented international effort to develop software tools that realize an ambitious vision of a pervasive and dependable computing infrastructure has the potential to fundamentally alter the role computing plays in the scientific process. By making effective and dependable access to significant computing resources a reality, the ability of a research team to verify a novel hypothesis will only depend on their creativity and imagination. In other words, super computing will no more be the privilege of the "super scientists". While advances in hardware and software technologies drive this democratization process, the long term impact of these advances depends on fundamental changes in the way application software and middleware is developed, maintained and funded. Domain scientists, computer scientists and the funding agencies bear the responsibility to take the necessary measures so that we do not miss the opportunity to change the way we do science. The talk is based on almost two decades of experience in delivering High Throughput Computing (HTC) capabilities to the scientific community via the Condor system and our recent involvement in national and international efforts to develop and deploy grid technologies.
Dr. Livny's research focuses on distributed processing and data management systems and data visualization environments. His recent work includes the Condor high throughput computing system, the DEVise data visualization and exploration environment and the BMRB repository for data from NMR spectroscopy.