Thursday 26 February 2009

All set for Sicily

Preparations are well underway and indeed almost complete for the NGS presence at OGF25 / EGEE User Forum event next week in Catania, Sicily.

The NGS has organised the UK and Ireland Federation stand which is number B08 and located just outside the Michelangelo meeting room. Several UK and Irish organisations will be represented on the stand including GridPP, OMII-UK, NeSC, Grid-Ireland and the NGS.

Several NGS staff and associated staff will be present at the conference and will be helping to staff the UKI exhibition stand over the week. If there is anyone in particular you would like to speak to then please drop by and we can arrange a meeting. Staff present includes NGS directors, technical staff, helpdesk manager, liaison officer and many more!

Now that all remains to be done is hope that the packages for the exhibition stand arrive safe and sound and to pack the suitcase!

Thursday 12 February 2009

RA Training at NeSC

A bit short notice so apologies for that, but we have just been informed that NGS RA training will be taking place at NeSC next week (18th). So if you are interested in being able to dispense grid certificates at your institution then please see the webpage for further details.

Please note that it does say by "invitation only" but this is untrue! The event is open to any interested parties.

Friday 6 February 2009

NGS user survey report

Over the summer of 2008, NGS users were invited to participate in the first ever user survey. The survey was carried out on the recommendation of the NGS Review Board users in order to ascertain the usage, type of usage and feedback about the NGS in general.

The results of this survey are now available from the NGS website. If you have any comments or queries regarding the survey then please contact the NGS Liaison Officer (gillian.sinclair@manchester.ac.uk).

Tuesday 3 February 2009

NGS sponsored workshop - Modelling protein-carbohydrate recognition in-silico

Modelling protein-carbohydrate recognition in-silico
A Computational Carbohydrate Chemistry workshop
Cavendish Campus,
University of Westminster, London
April 20th-April 24th 2009

Supported by the National Grid Service, this workshop will train participants how to use AMBER, CHARMM and AutoDock to run in silico experiments. It will also teach bioscientists how to model carbohydrate binding proteins and their ligands on the NGS to decrease execution times of experiments using a web-based graphical user interface (GUI), which was developed within the framework of the ProSim project supported by the JISC Engage programme.

The training will be led by Dr. Ross Walker, SDSC, USA and Dr. Michael Crowley, NREL, USA who are both members of the development team for AMBER and CHARMM and Dr. Martin Frank, GCRC, Germany who has experience of using AutoDock in modelling protein-carbohydrate recognition.

For further details and registration please visit the workshop website. Deadline for registration is the 19th of March.