All set for Sicily

Preparations are well underway and indeed almost complete for the NGS presence at OGF25 / EGEE User Forum event next week in Catania, Sicily.

The NGS has organised the UK and Ireland Federation stand which is number B08 and located just outside the Michelangelo meeting room. Several UK and Irish organisations will be represented on the stand including GridPP, OMII-UK, NeSC, Grid-Ireland and the NGS.

Several NGS staff and associated staff will be present at the conference and will be helping to staff the UKI exhibition stand over the week. If there is anyone in particular you would like to speak to then please drop by and we can arrange a meeting. Staff present includes NGS directors, technical staff, helpdesk manager, liaison officer and many more!

Now that all remains to be done is hope that the packages for the exhibition stand arrive safe and sound and to pack the suitcase!

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.