| What's your role within grid computing? |
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Using existing tools in order to achieve the best results in environmental modeling with particular regards to weather and marine forecast and climate changes modeling. Then, if needed, develop new grid tools in order to make grid solutions more effective for my interests and, above all, the community ones (I could add and to save the world‚ but maybe could be too much for a poor computer scientist). |
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| Why did you get in to grid? |
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That is nice. After my first experience in Beowulf cluster building in 1997 and then HPC applications, coming back to my final work about the development of a GIS software from scratch (in 1998 in Italy was something of new) I thought about how much computing power was wasted by PCs left doing basically nothing except Cards, Bomb field, surfing on the internet and using Office tools. Few months later, after I earned my degree, I was involved in a project about air quality using from scratch developed parallel models and I had to interface the user interface running inside a GIS on Windows and the environmental model running on a Beowulf Linux cluster. I develop a custom protocol to submit jobs and stage data between the Windows box and the cluster taking into account security, local job queues and staging files. After some months, the available clusters became two and the protocol and its software interfaces were ready for the new situation. Many years later, while I was a PhD student in Marine Science and Engineering, in 2001 I used my tools to implement a model chain in order to compute high resolution weather forecasts over my place (of course, I was really interested to use them to win my sailing races, it almost worked), but I moved to the emerging (for that time) technology of web services. I used .net on the Windows side and a tool called Glue on the Linux side. Web services was not enough for my needs because I needed for state full and notification, than enhanced the standard web services to provide this features (ok, in a really rough way, but it worked!). Then, finally, I applied to the First International Summer School on Grid Computing and it was the source of the revelation: what I was doing since few years was called Grid and the tools I developed was really close to the Globus Toolkit (taking into account I was just a, self driven in this topics, PhD student). The ISSGC (which I join as a student/tutor even in ‚2004, as a lecturer in ‚2005 and as class room assistant in ‚2006 editions) was one of best experiences of ever. Everything happened then is just a story that I‚will try to turn it to history thanks to grids, of course. |
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| What did you study at university? |
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Another one page story? Could be. Formally my first degree is in Marine Environmental Science with thesis in GIS development using C++ in Win32 software platform. Before to complete successfully my curriculum in Marine Environmental Science I attended for about 3 years to the degree course in Telecommunications Engineering passing exams about computer programming, computer science fundaments ad software design with scores ranging between good and excellent. After my degree I attended the PhD course in Marine Science and Engineering defending my thesis in Environmental Modeling using Grid Computing techniques. |
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| What did you want to be at school? |
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I was really lucky from this point of view: I found some workbooks of mine aged when I attended the elementary school period (about 7 to 10 years old). My dream was to be an ‚inventor, so that the semantic meaning of the world inventor could be considered not so far since the scientist‚ and, as scientists I design something of new about from scratch studying what other scientists done before me. I defined myself as a scientist and not a computer scientist as how formally I am because, especially dealing with grids, the multidisciplinary and the interdisciplinary are keywords and not just because cool in a project proposal definition. |
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| What are the highlights of your job? |
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Deal with technologies that can potentially change the future and the world in a better way, manage, explore, design what tomorrow generations will not considered as pioneering but just as something of available. One example for all: during my dissertation about my degree thesis I told: in a not so far future, five years or less, GIS will disappear as something in the hype and will be integrated in commonly used software applications and the street people will not know about the meaning of the acronym GIS, but will use it as everybody uses GoogleMap and street navigators, but how much of the common users knows about GIS and web GIS? I think it will the same with grid technologies and the recent scientific discussions about the meaning of the grids and of the clouds is just something confirming my thought. About that usually I quote William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2): What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. |
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| What are the lowlights of your job? |
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There are so many people working on grid research that when you are sure you found a complete unexplored field and you produce something you will find more and more similar solutions. That could be felt as something of positive, means that your creativity carried out something of interesting! Working on an all the world wide scene could be frustrating because big and well organized, and funded, research groups arrive for first to solve something even you begun early. That is normal. Cooperation is the key not only in this field of technological science and research. Grids are build for cooperation and not only between machines, but even humans: are both resources! |
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| What do you do when you're not at work? |
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Everything normal people does when are not in their business world so, of course, enjoy the life in any possible way as going out in smashing groovy places, cooking for friends, writing not scientific texts as novels, practicing sports, scuba diving and, above all, sailing races. In my world, sailing races and the grid are one for the other one, my US boss, kiddingly tell about me that what I do with grids (environmental models, instruments, data distribution) is to achieve best sailing performances and to win races. Could be true, could be fine, could be cool, could be useful for science and grid technology! |
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| What are your goals for the next year? |
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Try to marry an astonishing and sweet econometric girl and then develop together grid enabled coupled climate and socio-economic models, of course, to save the world. I‚ would like to setup a cross country free and zero costs production grid and then develop a project proposal asking funds for the manpower application development and to improve the hardware and not vice versa. The feet on the land goal for the next year could be simply produce something of new and working fine on the grid and, of course, I am working on it yet. |
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| Would you encourage your children to get in to grid and IT? |
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Definitely, maybe. I have no children now (I hope, but it should be so), but I deal with child because I teach sailing and scuba diving too and, above all, at university I teach topics related with grids (ok, is an IT faculty, so students are yet involved in IT). I encourage youngsters to approach at their (future) career taking into account the importance of IT even if their dreams are different as to be a physician, a lawyer, an archeologist. In Italy is still possible hearing sentence as I am a human scientist, a defender of the good and you, other scientists with your evil machines are taking over the world. |
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| What do you want to be when you grow up? |
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Growing up? From the creative point of you I don't want to growing up! The Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli, renewing the Platonic myth of the demiurgo, the artisan of the mankind and of the universe, stated that inside of each one of us there is a fanciullino, a sort of daemon responsible of our childish emotions, of our feelings and our attitude of looking around expressing what we see with the world of poetry even we grew old. I think a good goal for when I grow up is assuming my fanciullino as the demiurgo of my personal and even scientific life. The results? Of course, contribute to change the world and save it! |
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Giuseppe Agrillo
Angelo Riccio
Giulio Giunta