Prof. Uwe Schwiegelshohn

  

Colloquium 09.11.2009


How can we establish and maintain e-infrastructures for research?




Although the demand for IT support is increasing across a large number of disciplines most IT-hardware and many IT-services are still provided locally. Most institutions have their local compute centers that face increasing difficulties to satisfy the requirements of a very heterogeneous clientele.  New concepts like Grid or Cloud computing promise to address these problems. But only for few disciplines like particle physics they have achieved an almost mature state.
Like similar endeavors in other countries, the D-Grid initiative sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research has been started in 2005 to establish a national e-infrastructure that is particularly targeted towards public research and private-public partnerships involving small and medium enterprises.  During the last four years, various projects of D-Grid have produced new insights and technological advances.
In this talk, we present some of these results. Mainly, we focus on the organizational and structural aspects and also compare D-Grid with commercial offerings in the Cloud computing area. At the end, we discuss some of the financial and legal challenges that must be addressed for sustainability of these new e-infrastructures.


Uwe Schwiegelshohn received the Diploma and the Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the TU Munich in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He was with the Computer Science department of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 1988 to 1994 before becoming full Professor at TU Dortmund University where he heads the Robotics Research Institute since 2005. In 2008 he was appointed vice president of this university. Also in 2008 he became managing director of the Government sponsored D-Grid corporation to coordinate the Grid projects in Germany.
His main research interests are scheduling problems and Grid computing.