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!

Brief return

The NGS staff are all back from the EGEE conference in Barcelona where NGS received a fair amount of publicity thanks to a keynote presentation from David Wallom (our technical director), the exhibition stand and several posters and presentations from NGS staff.

You may think we would have time to catch our breath but it's not so. On Wednesday we are running a NGS roadshow event at the University of Glasgow where we have over 40 people attending from 4 different universities across the central belt of Scotland. We have some great speakers lined up for this event and more details can be seen on the event page.

Talking of events, there is still time to register for the NGS Innovation Forum. Registrations keep coming in and the closing date is the 13th of October so you haven't got long left! The break out sessions are proving to be really popular and it's a great way to meet up with researchers in similar areas to discuss issues etc. The registration link can be found here.

In non-event news the latest edition of the NGS newsletter is out now featuring articles on the NGS and GridPP working closer together, NGS roadshows, a spotlight on the Manchester team and much more. If there is anything you would like to see in the next edition of the newsletter or if you have a suggestion for a story then please contact the NGS (support@grid-support.ac.uk).

NGS research highlighted

The latest edition of iSGTW highlighted research carried out at the Univeristy of Oxford using NGS resources. Thushka Maharaj and Blanca Rodriguez both work on the Integrative Biology project and have used the NGS to examine the effects of defibrillation on the heart. Further information can be found in the iSGTW article.

The latest edition of the quarterly NGS newsletter is also out now featuring articles on hardware upgrades at the University of Glasgow, an update on the progress of the Engage project, how astronomers and cosmologists are making the most of the NGS and much more.

If you have anything you would like to see highlighted in the next edition of the NGS newsletter which is due out at the end of May then please let us know!

Welcome to 2009

Bit of a late kick off in the NGS 2009 blog mainly due to illness so apologies for that. I hope you are all finding 2009 to be a good year so far!

Things have picked up here at the NGS yet again. The scheduled downtime which was announced in December has now been re-scheduled for February. This was due to building work at RAL falling behind schedule. Announcements will be made on the NGS website and NGS-NEWS mailing list nearer the time. It does affect quite a number of NGS services so watch out for the announcements!

The NGS partner site, University of Glasgow has undergone some hardware changes. It now has Supermicro servers which are configured as Grid worker nodes. Each server has two motherboards (i.e. 2 worker nodes) with 2 Quad-core, 64bit CPUs (running at 2.5GHz) per motherboard to give a total of 1360 cores. In terms of Grid storage, they have 20 Supermicro disk servers, each hosting 20TB of useable storage in a RAID 6 configuration, to give a total of 400TB space. This recent upgrade means that Glasgow is now the largest GridPP facility in terms of raw computing power (measured in kSI2K) available to the Grid. The image above shows Mark Meenan and Dave Martin from the University of Glasgow.

The remaining videos from the NGS Innovation Forum '08 have been uploaded to the website kindly put together by our colleagues at ReDReSS at Lancaster University.

If you have any items you would like advertised in the NGS fortnightly email bulletin then please let me know. The bulletin is sent to over 540 subscribers from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions.