Flying visit to QUB

This week saw several members of the NGS team fly over to Belfast to host a NGS roadshow at Queen's University Belfast.

The cold weather was quickly forgotten due to the warmth of the welcome by the local organiser Ricky Rankin who gave us a quick tour of the new library at QUB. I have to say that it is very impressive - much better than the cold dark libraries I had to frequent as a student!

We had nearly 30 attendees from both QUB and the University of Ulster which was great. We always invite NGS users to speak about their research at these events and this time we had Julie Bardin from the University of Strathclyde and Che Seabourne from the University of Leeds. Both gave excellent presentations about their research and also sang the presentations of the NGS and particularly the support and help they had received from our helpdesk. No I hadn't bribed them depsite several people asking!

Lunch was a lively event with many conversations about how the NGS could help research from ecology to cancer research and people asking how to get their grid certificates etc. Hopefully the intial interest will be followed up by new users from Northern Ireland!

Cloud Computing Users and the NGS

The Belfast e-Science Centre (BeSC), which is a member of the NGS now offers a hosting-on-demand service within the NGS for UK academic users. The BeSC already have several commercial partners which take advantage of the service and would now like academic users to make the most of this service as well.

The service allows a remote user to deploy software into servers within the BeSC domain and to manage these deployed services remotely. The BeSC service hosting cloud can be accessed via a web UI and using an API BeSC are developing (currently called libcloud); a Europar 09 paper on libcloud can be found here.

The API is intended to provide a provider neutral interface to remote resources such as those provided by Amazon, Flexiscale etc and the BeSC hosting cloud; plugins for all of these providers are part of the library. If you have an interest in using this library in your development and/or helping its development please contact Terry Harmer (t.harmer@besc.ac.uk) for more details.