Atif Mehmood and Adeel Zafar.
Image Courtesy Michael Thomas |
Over the past 18 months, five students from the National University of Sciences and Technology in Pakistan have traveled to Caltech to develop their grid computing skills. The students, who have already collaborated remotely with Caltech scientists for at least one year, spend six months in California developing grid software and services.
"It's a fantastic learning experience," says Adeel Zafar, one of two NUST students currently visiting Caltech. Zafar and Atif Mehmood, both research assistants preparing to apply to graduate school, started working on grids at NUST in early 2004. They deployed a grid node for the CMS particle physics experiment, then moved to developing Web services for the Grid Analysis Environment.
"Until recently all work with NUST had been remote, through email and occasional videoconferences," says Caltech's Michael Thomas, who has worked with NUST students for over two years. "The first student came to Caltech in February 2004, and it was very beneficial. Once they're here, the communication is a lot easier and their projects move along much faster."
Previous Caltech visitors from NUST (from left): Tahir Azim; Ahsan Ikram; and Waqas ur Rehman. |
At NUST, a team of computer science students led by Professor Arshad Ali and graduate student Ashiq Anjum collaborates remotely with Caltech, the University of Florida and CERN in Switzerland. The students develop their software engineering skills and help scientists in the U.S. and Europe enable data analysis on the grid. One or two students are then selected to travel to Caltech under a program sponsored by both institutions, the U.S. State Department and the Ministry of Science and Technology in Pakistan.
For the past two years, the students have worked actively on developing a java implementation of the Clarens grid framework and Web services to support interactive data analysis on the grid. Mehmood works on the Estimator Service, which estimates the resource consumption by a specific job before it is submitted, thus helping the grid select the appropriate resource for each job. Zafar develops the Steering Service, which provides continuous job feedback to grid users and allows users to control jobs interactively.
Thomas views the exchange program as a good opportunity for education. "When the students come here they're excellent programmers, but sometimes lack experience with formal software development practices. Here they write design documents, gather requirements and conduct unit testing, and they take those skills back to their university."
Learn more at the NUST
and Caltech Web pages.
—Katie Yurkewicz
e-mail this article
|
