Happy new year!

I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year break.

It's back to work and planning for the future here at the NGS with several future events on my to do list. 

At the end of last year I finished off the last of our user case studies which highlight how our users have used NGS resources and the advantages it has brought them.  The full set of case studies numbers 29 with the latest arrivals listed below -

• Using the NGS to run a computer tournament on social learning strategies - Luke Rendell, University of St Andrews

• Accelerating the Processing of Large Corpora: Using Grid Computing Technologies for Lemmatizing 176 Million Words Arabic Internet Corpus - Majdi Sawalha, University of Leeds

• Computer Simulations of Biological Molecules at the Atomic Level - Sarah Harris, University of Leeds

The next set of case studies are at the planning stage but these will take a slightly different direction.  The next set of case studies will look at how the NGS is working with large national and international projects to fulfill their objectives. 

Also on the horizon is Easter conference season with several events coming up including the EGI Community Forum which will take place in Munich in March.  Several NGS staff have submitted abstracts to this event highlighting work we have carried out in various areas including champion networks, authorisation and authentication.

The week before Munich is the Software Sustainability Institute Collaboration Workshop which you may remember from previous years.  This year the event will be held in Oxford and the NGS is involved in several ways including holding a session for our SeIUCCR Community Champions.  Watch this space for more information!

Apart from attending other organisation's events I have one of our own to organise.  Following the success of last years SeIUCCR e-infrastructure summer school, we will be holding another summer school this year.  After the deluge of applications we had last year, I am planning to advertise earlier this year to give a little more time to go through all the applications!  Again keep an eye on the NGS website and our mailing list for more information.