NGS Induction coming very soon!

No it's not some strange initiation ceremony but an announcement to say that there are some last minute places left for an introductory course to the National Grid Service.

The course will be held next Friday (6th Feb) at John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester by the training team from NeSC. I should make it clear that there are 2 John Ryland libraries and the one you are looking is not the beautiful gothic 19thC city centre library but rather the concrete monolith on Oxford Road in the university campus!

The one day induction will cover topics such as creating and running jobs on the NGS and using the NGS portal enabling you to get up and running on the NGS quickly and easily. If you would like to attend this course then please contact David Fergusson (dfmac@nesc.ac.uk) at NeSC to book your place.

Welcome to 2009

Bit of a late kick off in the NGS 2009 blog mainly due to illness so apologies for that. I hope you are all finding 2009 to be a good year so far!

Things have picked up here at the NGS yet again. The scheduled downtime which was announced in December has now been re-scheduled for February. This was due to building work at RAL falling behind schedule. Announcements will be made on the NGS website and NGS-NEWS mailing list nearer the time. It does affect quite a number of NGS services so watch out for the announcements!

The NGS partner site, University of Glasgow has undergone some hardware changes. It now has Supermicro servers which are configured as Grid worker nodes. Each server has two motherboards (i.e. 2 worker nodes) with 2 Quad-core, 64bit CPUs (running at 2.5GHz) per motherboard to give a total of 1360 cores. In terms of Grid storage, they have 20 Supermicro disk servers, each hosting 20TB of useable storage in a RAID 6 configuration, to give a total of 400TB space. This recent upgrade means that Glasgow is now the largest GridPP facility in terms of raw computing power (measured in kSI2K) available to the Grid. The image above shows Mark Meenan and Dave Martin from the University of Glasgow.

The remaining videos from the NGS Innovation Forum '08 have been uploaded to the website kindly put together by our colleagues at ReDReSS at Lancaster University.

If you have any items you would like advertised in the NGS fortnightly email bulletin then please let me know. The bulletin is sent to over 540 subscribers from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions.