What are they up to in Europe with the grid?

If you are interested in seeing what European researchers get up to with grid resources then check out the new edition of Projects.

A new edition of Projects magazine has recently been released which focuses on Grid projects in Europe. Many of these projects demonstrate how grid technology has been used in a wide variety of research areas such as kidney diseases, HIV, neurosemantics, renewable energy, access to social science data and much more!

As well as research articles the magazine also has articles on how the European Grid Initiative (EGI) was formed and lessons learnt from the previous EGEE project.

The magazine can be found on the interactive website.

Crime and the grid (and a slight return)

If I thought my journey to Sweden for the last ever EGEE user forum was stressful, little did I know about the return one! Thanks to a volcano it took me 3 days, 7 trains, 41 hours, 6 countries and 2 overnight stays to get home. Not doing that again in a hurry...

So updates from the NGS - not a great deal mainly because I've been away! However we do have a new user case study up on the website . Nick Malleson from the University of Leeds has been using NGS resources to model criminal patterns in Leeds. A really interesting and different use of NGS resources!

A quick reminder as well incase you haven't seen the announcements but the registration for our Communicating Science event will close on Wednesday afternoon so register soon if you want to attend!

Déjà vu? No just some duplication…

Next week I’ll be attending the last ever EGEE conference in the slightly chilly surroundings of Uppsala, Sweden. The NGS will be attending the event in good numbers with many staff attending as we are heavily involved in the EGEE successor, the EGI.

As usual we will have an exhibition stand in conjunction with several other UK e-science institutions including GridPP and NeSC. We have lots of examples of how researchers in the UK are using the grid in there every day research as well as details of what we’ve been working on here at the NGS. GridPP will have their Real-time monitor with them so you can see how the data from the LHC is being distributed and sent round the world as it happens.

I’m looking forward to the conference as its an exciting time of transition for the EGEE / EGI project. I feel that countries will start working even more closely together with EGI which can only benefit our researchers who are increasingly involved in international collaborations through European projects etc. The question is how do we get there? How do we work together more closely and more collaboratively? Hopefully some of these questions will be answered at the dedicated EGI sessions at the conference.

So all I have to do now is cross my fingers and hope that all the material for our stand arrives safe and sound in Sweden today, grab some Swedish Krona and work out how I will cope with a beer costing about £5.50 for a 50cl bottle when I usually pay £3!

Oh and I should explain the title of this post – I will be blogging about the conference as part of the GridCast team so my blogs will be reposted on their blog. Apologies if you see them twice!

Catch up with the news

The latest edition of NGS News, the quarterly newsletter from the NGS, is out now.

This Christmas edition has a European flavour as we describe the NGS activities in Europe and our participation in building the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). There is also an excellent article from Jonathan Churchill from the NGS at RAL and Paul Wilkinson from Exeter University who give an excellent use case study of the new User interface / workload management system (UI/WMS) for pest insect gene coding. Finally we also have articles on why we need certification and the ongoing developments in this field, a user case study from Dr Narcis Fernandez-Fuentes at the University of Leeds on virtual candidate drug trials and much much more.

The newsletter can be found on the NGS website.

Pioneers required!

The NGS has recently announced a pre-production release of a WMS (Workload Management System) resource broker which will allow users to easily submit jobs to the NGS, without the need to specify where the job should run.

The WMS has quite a few advanced features for parameterised jobs and file staging that mean that it will be possible to launch 100’s of jobs easily to the NGS, and have the results returned to your home directory.

The WMS is easy to use through a UI (user interface) machine where users can specify their jobs and any files the job requires. You can also describe any additional requirements (hardware, software) and the WMS then automatically selects the best resources on the NGS to run the job.

It sounds pretty easy and you can try it for your self! Some simple examples are available at the UI/WMS tutorial(s). Please give it a go if you have a few minutes to spare, and let us know how you get on (support@grid-support.ac.uk).

The NGS Resource Broker and User Interface is based on the gLite 3.1 WMS-LB and UI nodes from the EGEE Project.

Way up north

A long train journey up the west coast took at least one of the NGS team to the NGS Roadshow event at the University of Glasgow yesterday. The others had slightly shorter train journeys or a flight but at least I got to see some stunning scenery!

We had a really good turn out for the event which was held in the rather nice surroundings of the University Library annexe - 43 people, the vast majority of whom were not current users of the NGS.

The event kicked off in traditional style with an introduction by our Technical Director, Dr David Wallom. This was then followed by 2 user presentations from people at the University of Manchester. Sanjay Kharche spoke about his use of NGS resources for multi-scale cardiac Modeling whilst Mahmoud Ibrahim explained how he benefits by using Gaussian on the NGS.

After the examples of how the NGS can be used, Dr David Fergusson from NeSC explained how you can actually apply for and start using NGS resources followed up by a presentation on the types of training available from NeSC and further afield.

The event was wrapped up by Dr Stuart Purdie who described the European picture and the role of EGEE. Well done to Stuart who kept going after his laptop locked up and lost all his slides!

Lunch was a typically lively affair with a great deal of discussion taking place on a wide range of topics. There is certainly plenty going on in the UK grid computing field!

Our next roadshow is not until the 11th of November so we have a bit of a breather until then. However we do have the Innovation Forum which will take place on the 21st - 22nd of October and registration closes on the 13th so if you haven't registered yet, do so soon!

#egee - Users? What are they?

Another update from the EGEE 09 conference here in Barcelona.

This morning I went to the session on “Users on the Grid” as, being the outreach person who is trying to encourage new users to use the NGS, it’s a topic close to my heart. It's also sometimes easy to forget at some grid conferences that the grid should be there for people to use and not for people to build. It's nice to be reminded that there is an audience out there wanting to use it!

There were a range of presentations from different research areas including particle physics and the life sciences but unfortunately some of the other presentations, from the computational chemistry community for example, didn’t take place.

There was an interesting presentation regarding user support for the Atlas experiment who mainly use Gmail to keep track of their user support queries. The presenter said a big thank you to whoever from Google is responsible for Gmail! The size of their task is quite immense even going so far as to have shift workers – one for the EU time zone and one for the US time zone. This will increase even more in November when they will be moving onto double shifts to cope with the anticipated large influx of relatively inexperienced grid users. It makes the NGS helpdesk look pretty simple in comparison!

The next talk of major relevance to me was the life sciences. The speaker here outlined that the life sciences community contains a large number of different types of researcher all of whom have different levels of knowledge about grid – low, medium or high.

They have put in place various means to get life science researchers engaged with the grid including training, documentation, ticketing and essential tools. The training has been especially important for users with medium to low awareness with intensive hands on training being very welcome and very effective.

Due to the difference in levels of experience in grid computing it is important to have documentation to suit all levels with the presenter pointing out that low level users need examples of APIs usage. For the life sciences one of the most important set of tools are those for managing data but there are also privacy issues that have to be considered. [This is why the NGS is having a session on data handling at our innovation forum in October!].

It was an interesting session and reassuring to hear that we all have the same problems with communities. However I was surprised when I heard that the astronomy and astrophysics community also had barriers to adoption and poor knowledge of grid techniques.

Hopefully one day we can overcome these problems and have everyone using the grid in the same way that they use the internet now.

#egee - The NGS in the spotlight

Yesterday the NGS Technical Director, Dr David Wallom, gave a keynote address on the NGS to a pretty packed room here at the EGEE conference in Barcelona. David talked about the current state of the NGS and also where we were headed in the future given the move towards an EGI. He explained the resources that we offered our users and highlighted the large number of institutions who have signed up to become members of the NGS, realising the important of giving their researchers access to the most amount of resources. The range of research performed using NGS resources was also highlighted with David talking about many of our popular use case examples. There were lots of questions with many delegates taking the opportunity to quiz David as it is usually the other way round!

This was a great opportunity for the NGS to be showcased to a European (and further beyond) audience at an important event and we would like to thank the organisers for giving the NGS this opportunity.

If you would like to see the slides from Davids presentation they can be found here.

Climate change and impact assessment in Exeter

Yesterday I was down at the University of Exeter along with our Technical Director, David Wallom, to run a NGS roadshow event. 23 people had registered for the event which featured two presentations from some of our biggest users.

Andrew Price from the University of Southampton spoke about the GENIE model system which stands for Grid ENabled Integrated Earth system model. The model demonstrated possible scenarios and perfectly demonstrated the need for resources such as the NGS to carry out this sort of modelling.

The second speaker was Dr Zhongwei Guan from the Department of Engineering at the University of Liverpool. Dr Guan leads a research team all of whom heavily rely on the NGS in their research. Dr Guan spoke about why and how he uses the NGS in his work and the benefits he has found doing so. He also showed some of the modelling he has carried out on impact assessments on structures such as fuselages and lattice structures.

All the presentations were very well received and lunch was a lively affair with much discussion regarding the NGS, the resources available and how Exeter researchers could benefit from it.

The roadshows are now on hold until the end of the month when we have one in Glasgow. If you are near Glasgow and would like to attend the roadshow then please register at the event website.

Watch this site for news from the EGEE conference in Barcelona next week. Hopefully between being on the UKI stand and keeping on top of all my other work, I'll have time to blog about some of the sessions I attend during the week.

e-Science demos wanted!

As previously announced on this blog, the next EGEE conference will take place in Barcelona on the 21st – 25th September. The NGS is organising the UKI Federation exhibition stand where we will be exhibiting alongside OMII-UK, NeSC, GridPP and Grid-Ireland.

In a change to the previous EGEE meetings there won’t be a dedicated demo booth section, instead all demos will now take place on the exhibition stands. If you would like to give a demonstration of your e-science application on the UKI stand then please let us know! Contact Gillian (gillian.sinclair(at)manchester.ac.uk) at the NGS to discuss your demo etc.

Obesity and e-research (essConf09)

I attended a very interesting talk today on the Obesity e-Lab project which is based at the University of Manchester. It’s a long way to come to Cologne to hear about a project based at your own institution but quite often it’s the way we find out about these things!

As we all know from the media, obesity is becoming a major problem across the globe with over 1 billion people now classed as being overweight. The project was introduced as being non-technical and indeed it wasn’t much to the relief of some of the audience. The presentation was given by Sarah who is responsible for user engagement and usability. She goes out and talks to the users to ask if what the project is producing is what they actually want and need.

This project takes a more rounded view of obesity in so much that it’s not just your calorie intake that affects your weight. It can also be factors such as available food, proximity of shops, available transport, peer groups, income etc. The project involves a range of people from epidemiologists to social scientists and computer scientists and aims to take into account many of these factors in examining the causes of obesity. They aim to do this by examining over 5000 datasets from the UK Data Archive. The sheer volume of data is challenging as well as the problems of identifying which data set you need and how to access it.

The project is still in early days and has a list of goals which include –

• Supporting interdisciplinary community of obesity researchers
• Reducing barriers to database access
• Developing a community
• Contributing to e-Labs

Current work is identifying good practices, understanding problems, planning training and support in order to make sure that the community can use and get the benefits of the project. A working prototype is currently available in which users can search and download variables from a dataset. This allows users to download just the variables they require instead of the whole dataset.

The project is also contributing to e-Lab which is a distributed and collaborative space for e-science. There are other projects working on similar research areas so they are collaborating to build an e-Lab by sharing software components, requirements and use cases.

That’s all I have time to blog about today but I did attend another talk that grabbed my attention so hopefully I’ll have time to blog about that one tomorrow between attending talks and being on the NGS / EGEE exhibition stand!

e-Social Science in Germany

Tomorrow I am off to Cologne for the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science which is organised by the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) based at the University of Manchester.

I've had the pleasure of attending 3 out of the previous 4 of these conferences and they have always been very interesting showing the breadth of research in the social sciences using grid technology.

Many of the UK researchers who will be presenting their work over the next few days are users of the NGS. The NGS will have an exhibition stand at the event in conjunction with EGEE so pop over and say hello!

Hopefully I will find time to blog about some of the presentations during the conference so watch this space!