Last week saw the NGS outreach team at the University of Huddersfield for a NGS roadshow event. The local organiser was Ibad Kureshi who did a fantastic job of organising everything locally and making the day went smoothly. Ibad also did a great job of advertising the event locally meaning that we had over 30 participants at the morning roadshow and over 20 registered for the afternoon training event.
The roadshow kicked off in the usual fashion with an overview of the NGS from our Technical Director, David Wallom from the University of Oxford. Many people in the audience were not familiar with the NGS before the event or had just heard our name mentioned but were unaware of what the NGS actually does so this presentation is designed as a gentle introduction!
Following David we moved onto presentations from NGS users including Paul Martin who is a researcher at the University of Huddersfield. Paul has been using the NGS for computer modelling of thoria in order to determine its suitability for a next generation nuclear fuel. He explained how he has used DL_POLY 2 which scales very well on the NGS. Paul in particular praised the good on-line instructions/training, FAQ’s, blog and helpdesk/support which is great to hear!
Paul was followed by another user, Matt Smith from the University of Liverpool. Ibad had suggested that a presentation by an Abaqus user would go down very well due to the interest in this software package at Huddersfield. We were happy to oblige! Matt spoke about his use of Abaqus on the NGS to model lattice structures. This was a very interesting talk helped by the sample materials Matt brought along to illustrate his presentation. As Ibad had thought, Matt’s presentation prompted plenty of questions about his usage of the NGS and about his research.
David Fergusson from the training team at NeSC then elaborated on how users actually get started on the NGS and how to apply for a certificate, run jobs etc. Again there were plenty of questions showing that Huddersfield researchers are keen to use our resources!
The final presentation was by Ibad who outlined the locally available resources and how these tied in with the resources offered by the NGS. We’ve found in previous roadshows that having presentations about local resources helps the audience to visualise how the NGS fits in locally and that it is there to complement existing resources.
All the presentations from the event are available on the NGS website from the event page.
Showing posts with label DL-poly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DL-poly. Show all posts
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Thursday, 5 March 2009
Day 3 in Catania
Yesterday I went to the computational chemistry session which consisted of 2 sessions each with 3 talks.
Compchem kicked off the proceedings – they are one of the EGEE VO’s (supported by several EGEE sites) and currently have over 60 users since they started at the end of 2004. Much like the NGS they also target user conferences in order to advertise their presence and the services they can offer the chemistry community. Again, like the NGS, they are perhaps restricted in which countries they can target and so attend European events. They also provide training for users to help them get up and running on the EGEE grid resources and to use popular software such as GAMESS, DL-Poly etc. It’s nice to see that in order to reach out to users that they have done case studies of previous research in order to highlight successes etc.
For me this presentation was the highlight of the first half of the computational chemistry session!
After the break I swapped sessions as it seemed that all the user orientated sessions ie those that actually featured real uses of grid technology, all clashed with each other.
The next session I went to was entitled “grid technology uptake by scientific communities and SME's”. As the user engagement person for the NGS I was obviously more interested in reaching out to the scientific communities rather than the SME's. There were a large number of rather short talks in the session although some of these had been cancelled.
Although Sicily might seem like a small island, it does have its own grid. The Sicilian grid consists of 200 cores, 2GB of f RAM per core, 250 TB storage and gLite 3.1 middleware. To manage the thorny issue of licensed software, they have a system to manager this as they have grid enabled their Flex server. It was fantastic to hear someone actually say that building infrastructure is a waste of time if you don't build a user base - hear, hear! I was very impressed to see that they have purpose built classrooms and training infrastructure in place to make sure that grid is seen as a common tool. Unsurprisingly they were able to show a direct correlation between training and usage of infrastructure.
Compchem kicked off the proceedings – they are one of the EGEE VO’s (supported by several EGEE sites) and currently have over 60 users since they started at the end of 2004. Much like the NGS they also target user conferences in order to advertise their presence and the services they can offer the chemistry community. Again, like the NGS, they are perhaps restricted in which countries they can target and so attend European events. They also provide training for users to help them get up and running on the EGEE grid resources and to use popular software such as GAMESS, DL-Poly etc. It’s nice to see that in order to reach out to users that they have done case studies of previous research in order to highlight successes etc.
For me this presentation was the highlight of the first half of the computational chemistry session!
After the break I swapped sessions as it seemed that all the user orientated sessions ie those that actually featured real uses of grid technology, all clashed with each other.
The next session I went to was entitled “grid technology uptake by scientific communities and SME's”. As the user engagement person for the NGS I was obviously more interested in reaching out to the scientific communities rather than the SME's. There were a large number of rather short talks in the session although some of these had been cancelled.
Although Sicily might seem like a small island, it does have its own grid. The Sicilian grid consists of 200 cores, 2GB of f RAM per core, 250 TB storage and gLite 3.1 middleware. To manage the thorny issue of licensed software, they have a system to manager this as they have grid enabled their Flex server. It was fantastic to hear someone actually say that building infrastructure is a waste of time if you don't build a user base - hear, hear! I was very impressed to see that they have purpose built classrooms and training infrastructure in place to make sure that grid is seen as a common tool. Unsurprisingly they were able to show a direct correlation between training and usage of infrastructure.
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