After the storm

I'd like to say thank you to everyone who came along to the National Grid Service Innovation Forum '08 last week. We played host to over 120 people over 2 days at the Museum of Science and Industry (MoSI) in Manchester where delegates heard over 20 presentations ranging from services currently available to NGS users to upcoming services and the future direction of the NGS.

Thank you to everyone who has so far completed a feedback form and I'm pleased to say that the feedback so far has been extremely positive. If you still have a feedback form that you would like to submit then please contact me. The feedback has strongly indicated that we should hold a similar event at least once a year so watch this space!

It's also nice to see that reports about the event are popping up in other blogs such as this one from the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS).

The slides from the presentations will be up on the NGS website very soon and nearly all the presentations were videoed by colleagues from the Lancaster University Centre for e-Science so if you couldn't attend in person, you can see what you missed!

In other news there have been further software updates at the NGS so if you are a user of any of the following please take note!

EMBOSS 6.0.1
The latest release of EMBOSS (6.0.1) will be available on the NGS node at RAL (ngs.rl.ac.uk) next week. EMBOSS (The European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite) is an analysis package specially developed for the needs of the molecular biology user community. The software automatically copes with data in a variety of formats and even allows transparent retrieval of sequence data from the web. EMBOSS also integrates a range of currently available packages and tools, for sequence analysis, into a seamless whole. Further information on running EMBOSS on NGS resources can be found here.

Scali-MPI 5.6.4
The latest version of the commercial PlatformMPI (previously known as ‘ScaliMPI Connect’) MPI libraries are available on the NGS node at RAL (ngs.rl.ac.uk). All MPI software at RAL is linked to this latest version and is the default when compiling using mpicc,mpif77,mpif90,mpic++ . It provides a number of bug fixes and, for some user codes which call ‘free()’ repeatedly, it provides a significant speedup. RAL have benchmarked these libraries up to 10% faster than equivalent open source libraries such as MPICH.