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.

Were you caught on camera?

A selection of photos from the NGS Innovation Forum '08 are now available on the NGS Flickr and NGS Facebook groups. Feel free to tag, annotate, comment etc on photos!

Most of the presentations from the event are now available from the NGS website so if you'd like to have a look to see what you missed, to grab that website address you missed on the day or to refresh your memory now is your chance. The outstanding presentations will hopefully be added soon.

The NGS fortnightly news email bulletin has recently had an overhaul and now comes to you in lovely colourful html format. The fortnightly email contains news of software updates on the NGS, updates to NGS services, job adverts, conference announcements, training events and much more. If you'd like to be kept informed then please join our mailing list.

After the storm

I'd like to say thank you to everyone who came along to the National Grid Service Innovation Forum '08 last week. We played host to over 120 people over 2 days at the Museum of Science and Industry (MoSI) in Manchester where delegates heard over 20 presentations ranging from services currently available to NGS users to upcoming services and the future direction of the NGS.

Thank you to everyone who has so far completed a feedback form and I'm pleased to say that the feedback so far has been extremely positive. If you still have a feedback form that you would like to submit then please contact me. The feedback has strongly indicated that we should hold a similar event at least once a year so watch this space!

It's also nice to see that reports about the event are popping up in other blogs such as this one from the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS).

The slides from the presentations will be up on the NGS website very soon and nearly all the presentations were videoed by colleagues from the Lancaster University Centre for e-Science so if you couldn't attend in person, you can see what you missed!

In other news there have been further software updates at the NGS so if you are a user of any of the following please take note!

EMBOSS 6.0.1
The latest release of EMBOSS (6.0.1) will be available on the NGS node at RAL (ngs.rl.ac.uk) next week. EMBOSS (The European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite) is an analysis package specially developed for the needs of the molecular biology user community. The software automatically copes with data in a variety of formats and even allows transparent retrieval of sequence data from the web. EMBOSS also integrates a range of currently available packages and tools, for sequence analysis, into a seamless whole. Further information on running EMBOSS on NGS resources can be found here.

Scali-MPI 5.6.4
The latest version of the commercial PlatformMPI (previously known as ‘ScaliMPI Connect’) MPI libraries are available on the NGS node at RAL (ngs.rl.ac.uk). All MPI software at RAL is linked to this latest version and is the default when compiling using mpicc,mpif77,mpif90,mpic++ . It provides a number of bug fixes and, for some user codes which call ‘free()’ repeatedly, it provides a significant speedup. RAL have benchmarked these libraries up to 10% faster than equivalent open source libraries such as MPICH.

Live from the NGS Innovation Forum '08

Posting live from a very packed NGS Innovation Forum at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. We have a total of 127 delegates here over the next 2 days from all over the UK.

Currently Dave Fergusson from NeSC is speaking about the training opportunities available from NeSC and the NGS which range from helping new users get started to helping more advanced users make the most of the wide range of services available from the NGS.

Other talks today have included a keynote presentation from Dan Katz about TeraGrid and Michael Wilson speaking about EGI and how the NGS is involved in Europe.

For those of you who can't make the event all the presentations are being videoed and will be available online. Watch this space!

And it's closed

Registration for the National Grid Service Innovation Forum has now closed and I'm pleased to announce that we have 118 people attending over the two days. We are really pleased with the numbers that have registered and it's shaping up to be a great event. If you aren't able to attend, don't worry as colleagues from the Centre for e-Science at the University of Lancaster will be filming the presentations at the event so you can catch all the presentations at your leisure!

The latest fortnightly news bulletin from the NGS was released today and contained information about new software additions on the NGS including Gaussian 3, PC-GAMESS / Firefly 7.1.C and the expansion of the bioinformatics database provision. If you would like to receive a short fortnightly update by email from the NGS, you can subscribe here.

NGS Innovation Forum '08 - places are going fast!

It's been a busy couple of weeks here at the NGS. Many of us attended the EGEE conference in Istanbul where, as well as the conference, we were also involved in EGI and other project meetings. Thankfully most of us had arranged to stay on couple of days so we could actually see something of Istanbul rather than the inside of the conference centre!

The presentations from the workshop I organised on Dissemination and Outreach can now be found online and I'd like to take the opportunity to thank my speakers Sy Holsinger from Trust-IT Services and Vicky Huang from AGSC. During EGEE '08 I also got what I call "podded" as I was filmed for a podcast during which I talked about the NGS. I haven't actually been brave enough to watch it yet but if anyone is interested it can be found here.

On return from the conference it was straight back into preparations for the NGS Innovation Forum which is quickly approaching. If you have no idea what I'm talking about then all the information can be found on our website. The agenda is almost finalised and we have a fantastic line up of speakers talking about the latest developments for users at the NGS, use case scenarios for NGS resources and where the NGS is heading in the future. Registrations are coming in thick and fast so if you are thinking about coming along, register soon!