Portal:Complex Systems Digital Campus/E-Laboratory on ECCE

Portal:Complex_Systems_Digital_Campus/E-Laboratory_on_ECCE Complex systems science is closely linked to computing for many reasons: finding a mathematical representation to model the multiscale dynamics of a complex system typically requires a great amount of computing power, because this implies using solvers that will repeatedly check how well the data produced by the model matches the (possibly big) observed data. Then, once a mathematical model is available, computing power is again needed to produce the multiscale dynamics behaviour to be compared with the observed data, and one needs to repeat this step many times if one wants to experiment the resilience of the complex system and determine what can be done to prevent extreme events from happening.

An e-laboratory focussed on computing is therefore central to the science of complex systems and because the amount of data storage and computing power almost always vastly dwarfs that of a standard workstation, a complex systems scientist will typically need to use the combined power of many computers in order to come up with interesting results. Therefore, the challenge of the ECCE e-lab is to develop and deploy whatever is necessary both in terms of software or hardware in order to come up with computing systems that can deal with large complex systems, bridging the gap ranging from the individual to the collective, from genes to organisms to ecosystems, from atoms to materials to products, from notebooks to the Internet, from citizens to society. Because some large complex systems will require the combined power of several computers, one of the more advanced challenges of the ECCE e-lab will be to put together computing ecosystems consisting of heterogeneous computers possibly executing different pieces of software, all working in a cooperative way towards the single aim of modelling a particular complex system. Because a set of different autonomous interconnected machines can itself be considered as a complex system, the ultimate aim of the ECCE e-lab is to create Computational Ecosystems working together as a Complex System. Such complex systems could exhibit emergent behaviour which, in the case of a computational ecosystem, could lead to observing super or supra-linear acceleration, provided that acceleration is measured in quality and not in quantity. Qualitative acceleration could be defined as how much faster a complex system made of n machines would find a result of the same quality as a single machine on the same problem. Computational ecosystems working as a complex system can be used to solve any kind of very large problems. Even if the problems are not related to complex systems, the fact that a complex computational ecosystem is elaborated to solve them makes this research fall in the scope of this e-laboratory.

All in all, the challenge for the ECCE e-lab is to designing efficient large scale computing ecosystems as complex systems that could also be used reflexively to solve complex systems. For this to happen, many different elements need to be put together, involving data storage, communication, parallelization, security and robustness of both data and software, results visualisation, etc. All these elements can be the object of research projects of the ECCE e-lab.