There is a lot that happens around

the world we cannot control. We

cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot

prevent droughts, and we cannot

prevent all conflict, but when we

know where the hungry, the homeless

and the sick exist, then we can

help.

- Jan Schakowsky

THE POWER OF THE CLOUD, AND

GLOBAL RISK MODELING IN THE OPEN

Me: Joshua McKenty

Twitter: @jmckenty

Email: joshua@pistoncloud.com

IT Architect, Global Earthquake Model

Chief Architect, NASA Nebula

Founding Member, OpenStack

OpenStack Project Policy Board

CEO, Piston Cloud Computing

WHAT IS THE

GLOBAL EARTHQUAKE

MODEL?

“The GEM Foundation has set itself out to

engage a global community in the design,

development and deployment of state-of-

the-art models and tools for earthquake risk

assessment worldwide.”

An introduction to Risk Modeling

Reports…

…and Tools

CLOUD FOR RISK MODELING?

Challenges

» Complex calculations on large, federated

data sets

» Data is sensitive, sometimes secret,

often proprietary

» Process and calculations used need to

be certified and verifiable

» Results need to be public

A scientifically valid “mash-up”

Solution: Cloud

» Built to scale elastically to the extents of

the infrastructure (1-10,000 nodes)

» Run as a service (OpenGEM)

» Open source

» … and repeatable.

All i have is a hammer…

LESSONS LEARNED

Data

ExperimentsPeers

"International programs for

global change research and

environmental monitoring

crucially depend on the principle

of full and open data exchange"

- On the Full and Open Exchange of Scientific Data (A publication

of the Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data -

National Research Council) 1995

…the Internet was conceived as a communication mechanism for the dissemination of ideas and as a means to support distributed collaboration.

- Open Source Software Development and Distributed Innovation, Bruce Kogut and AncaMetiu, April 2001

"...without access to the source for

the programs we use... (i.e. when

simulation codes or parameter files

are proprietary or are hidden by their

owners), numerical

experimentation isn’t even

science. Science has to be

'verifiable in practice' as well as

'verifiable in principle’”

CLOUD CHANGES SCIENCE

“...Michael Faraday’s advice to his junior

colleague to: “Work. Finish. Publish.” needs to

be revised. It shouldn’t be enough to publish a

paper anymore. If we want open science to

flourish, we should raise our expectations

to: “Work. Finish. Publish. Release.” That is,

your research shouldn’t be considered complete

until the data and meta-data is put up on the

web for other people to use, until the code is

documented and released…

- Dan Gezelter

Science made real, again

Open Data

Open Stack

Open Science

CLOUD CHANGES

EVERYTHING