Policy for Supporting Grid Education and Training

1 Overview + Executive Summary

Volunteers: Malcolm Atkinson,

Notes: Principal messages:

1. It is necessary to invest in people – develop as rapidly as possible the understanding and culture to exploit e-Infrastructure – this will have major economic and social benefits.
2. This is urgent as the technological transition is significant, global and affects all walks of life
3. Countries and organisations can benefit from collaborating as they develop and deliver the education and training set out below

2 Context, scope and definitions

Volunteers: Malcolm Atkinson, Kilian Schwarz, Stephenie McLean

Notes: Principal messages

1. Major investments in e-Infrastructure & CyberInfrastructure + industrial examples (OGF enterprise programme, Grid Computing Now lists, … table in A4, summarise here)
2. Transforming effect of grids on the way we do research, design, diagnosis and planning – summary plus references to other statements.
3. Interaction with mass mechanisation and digital control of laboratory processes, engineering processes, medical diagnostics and treatments, …
4. Interaction with Web2.0 effects
5. Interaction with mobile and ubiquitous computing
6. Advances in digital communications
7. large-scale experimental, computational and storage facilities – e.g. ESFRI Roadmap
8. Identify audience - mainly University-level education and Industrial training as this is where our expertise lies, however, some limited focus on pre-University schools
9. This document will be aimed at politicians and policy makers however, not directly at academics

Definitions needed:

1. Grid Computing
2. e-Science
3. e-Infrastructure
4. t-Infrastructure
5. Education
6. Training

3 Motivation for Education and Training

Volunteers: Malcolm Atkinson, Ruediger Berlich

Notes: Principal messages

1. Reference other documents for motivation for Grids and assume that it is accepted as given, we're only interested in the motivation for Grid education & training here. See references section for some possible reference docs for this, but we may need more, or docs from sources other than OGF.
2. State the generic value of investing in E&T, preferably building on evidence collected by bodies such as the OECD and UNESCO. - Look at the data available on socio-economic impact
3. State the specific value of investing in technological E&T building on published evidence
4. Make a general and convincing argument for E&T in Grid Computing
5. Make point that the infrastructures are there but underutilised because of a lack of trained & educated personnel
6. Many of the issues facing us with Grid are administration issues, those of provisioning, monitoring, etc. of complex distributed systems, however, Universities are generally reluctant to teach Systems Administration topics. Describe these issues, show they stem from lack of understanding of how distributed systems work, and propose that we can address them though effective education and training.

3.1 Motivation for Education

Volunteers: Malcolm Atkinson, Lennart Johnsson

Notes: Principal messages

1. Examples of GC education demonstrating the scope and in each case identifying the long-term value for students, community or employers
2. Integration from the examples to show the value
3. Identification of the scale of the effort needed for specific focussed targets
4. identify "tipping-points" where possible, e.g. how many people would we need to train over a given period to foster widespread use
5. take good pilot projects and look at how it can be done across fields, on a larger scale, etc.
6. Identification of the value of agreeing standards of attainment (reference to ESTC, … )
7. need broad-based group of people to get this kind of info, people from different fields, etc.
8. can give examples of failures which may occur if there is no investment in Grid E&T
9. can give examples of good consequences which would ensue if there is investment in Grid E&T
10. cost-benefit analysis

3.2 Motivation for Training

Volunteers: David Fergusson, Ruediger Berlich,

Notes: Principal messages

1. Examples of GC training demonstrating the scope and in each case identifying the long-term value for students, community or employers
2. Integration from the examples to show the value
3. Identification of the scale of the effort needed
4. Identification of the value of agreeing standards of attainment (reference to ESTC, … )
5. cost-benefit analysis

4 Opportunities and Challenges for Education

Volunteers: Malcolm Atkinson, Christoph-Erdmann Pfeiler

Notes: Principal messages

1. Potential & incentive (established above) to rapidly expand the investment in Grid Education
2. Challenge to realise that potential - developing enough staff capacity, providing educational material, supporting t-Infrastructure, etc.
3. requirements

5 Responses in Education & Policy Requirements

Volunteers: Malcolm Atkinson,

Notes: Principal messages

1. details corresponding to the above – outreach, training and shared material to attract and prepare educators

Educators must be made aware of Grid Computing and the benefits which it can bring to their field. This requires a broad range of outreach activities such as exemplar projects and engagement with target communities such as GC training courses at domain-specific conferences.

There must also be a range of training opportunities available to educators in order for them to become sufficiently expert with these technologies. A number of general purpose and domain-specific summer schools are already run, e.g. ISSGC, etc (add more examples and ref the ICEAGE website list?) Other options such as modules in university courses are also available, but there are a limited number of such courses (ref the ET-CG and ICEAGE lists?). What are the policy implications of this?

Even for committed educators, however, the costs, in time and money, involved in developing GC and e-Infrastructures materials for their domains which are suitable for use in their courses can be high. One way to lower these costs is to maintain shared educational materials, suitable for use in accross a range of domains. The ICEAGE project currently provides a shared repository of materials for Grid Computing courses which includes materials produced by various summer schools. This material must be expanded to include more domain-specific material. Policy requirements?

1. Persuasive material to stimulate governments and organisations committing to providing grid education
2. Provision of pooled t-Infrastructure
3. Agreements on curricula and qualifications

Agreement on curricula and qualifications will ensure quality of Grid education. This in turn will encourage students to study these subjects. This requires a strong policy in order to encourage the takeup of standard curricula and to ensure that qualifications and credit for study are recognised.

1. collaborative responses
2. industry responses
3. what we will do
4. what others should do
5. strategies
6. recommende actions

6 Opportunities and Challenges for Training

Volunteers: David Fergusson, Ruediger Berlich, Brendan Hamill,

Notes: Principal messages

Similar to Education with transformation to training terms.

7 Responses in Training & Policy Requirements

Volunteers: David Fergusson, Ruediger Berlich, Brendan Hamill,

Notes: Principal messages

Similar to Education with transformation to training terms.

1. collaborative responses
2. industry responses
3. what we will do
4. what others should do
5. strategies
6. recommende actions

8 Suggested Strategy & Policy

Volunteers: Malcolm Atkinson,

Notes: Principal messages

The e-IRG group will contribute to this section.

9 Future work

Volunteers:

Notes: Principal messages

1. This will be populated as people write each section and future work is identified.
2. We need to look at the issue of metrics or ways to measure the impact of Grid E&T, this may be partially addressed within the doc body, but we assume we can't completely answer this issue so it should be mentioned under an issues section or identified for future work?

A1 Contributors

Volunteers: Morgane Artacho,

Notes: Principal messages

accurate recognition of contributions and authority

A2 Abbreviations, vocabulary & definitions

Volunteers: Kathryn Cassidy, Morgane Artacho

Notes: Principal messages

foundation of consistently used vocabulary to enable this document to be written and to help the subsequent dialogues and negotiations – must as far as possible be both precise and reflect natural usage.

A3 References

Volunteers: Morgane Artacho, Jo Newman,

Notes: Principal messages

These two OGF document contain some info on rationale for Grids

1. OGF Document 68: Workshop on Grid Applications: From Early Adopters to Mainstream Users

1. OGF Document 29: Open Grid Services Architecture Use Cases http://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.29.pdf

We should also reference other policy documents

1. ITC Policy Documents
2. S3 Roadmap

Find documents which explain engineering challenges so that we can reference them and indicate whether and how we address these challenges.

A4 Data and Evidence tabulations

Volunteers: Malcolm Atkinson,

Notes: Principal messages