Happy new year from the NGS

Welcome back after the Christmas holidays and I hope you had a good break. NGS staff are starting back today so there will be some catching up on user helpdesk queries and the usual getting back up to speed.

A couple of quick reminders of NGS news -

• the presentations from the NGS Innovation Forum are now available on the NGS website along with the posters from the event.

• there is still a chance to win Amazon vouchers in the NGS user survey so if you would like some last minute sale shopping on us, make sure you fill in the user survey by the end of the month!

Happy new year!

And breathe - it's over for another year

So the NGS Innovation Forum is over for another year and, although it seemed to consume most of my time over the last month, I’ll miss it!

This years event was well received by all those who attended according to the feedback I was given both at the event and afterwards by email. Always nice to know we’re doing the right thing!

The event kicked off on Tuesday with a day focused primarily on our users and I’m glad to say there were some present in the audience. Steven Young gave a brief summary of the Campus Champions who are our eyes and ears in institutions – ready to help users and to feedback comments and suggestions to us. We then moved onto a series of talks about user tools. The aim of this session was to talk through some of the tools that we offer in order that users could head home from the event and actually apply them in their research. The tools covered were –

• UI/WMS
• Application hosting environment (AHE)
• Databases
• Working with communities (in particular ccp4)
• NGS Cloud Prototype
• New Certificate Wizard

The day also featured three presentations from users who make a great deal of use of the NGS resources. We had presentations from a variety of research areas to demonstrate just how widely used our resource are. Luke Rendell from St. Andrews University talked about simulating learning strategies, Zhongwei Guan talked about modelling composite structures and Narcis Fernandes-Fuentes talked about using the NGS for early stage drug discovery. A bit of a range of uses!

Day 1 was really good with lots of questions and discussion which continued right the way from the last session through the drinks reception and poster viewing until the end of the event dinner!

Wednesday was aimed primarily at IT staff, sys admins etc so there were a few new faces on this day. In order to bring everyone up to speed, David Wallom re-capped the discussion from findings the day before. We then kicked off with a presentation from the University of Westminster who have been a NGS member for some time before moving onto a discussion session about how the NGS can help to facilitate collaboration between researchers and institutions.

Presentations on two NGS projects followed – accessing the NGS with Shibboleth and updates to the NGS accounting provision. The last session was dedicated to the EU with an update from the EGI Director, Steven Newhouse followed by presentations from two ESFRI projects – CLARIN and ELIXIR.

An exhausting couple of days but well worth it!

From an outreach point of view I’m now busy organising a couple of new roadshow events that people requested during the IF, I’m gathering the presentations from the event to go on the NGS website (watch this space!) and announcing the winner of the best poster at the event.

Congratulations to Jarmila Husby from the School of Pharmacy, University of London whose poster “Molecular Modelling Studies of the STAT3β homodimer:DNA complex” was voted the winner by the delegates. Jarmila won an Amazon voucher which is very handy with Christmas coming up! All the posters from the event will also be on the website soon.

If you missed the event there are a number of ways to catch up – the Twitter posts are available, a blog post from Catherine Gater of EGI, an article on Cloud computing from Simon Hettrick at SSI and photos from the event are available on the NGS Flickr account.

Thank you once again to all those who attended and hopefully we’ll see you all next year!

NGS Cloud at the NGS Innovation Forum

We're on the home straight for the NGS Innovation Forum. Registration closes this Friday (12th Nov) at 4.30pm sharp so if you want to attend and haven't yet registered, you had better do so soon!

All our previous NGS innovation forums have featured breakout sessions with groups reporting back to the meeting as a whole. This year we will have our breakout sessions as usual but we would like to flag one up early!

We will be having a break out session on the new NGS Cloud prototype so this would be an ideal opportunity for current users of our cloud service to feedback directly their experiences to NGS staff. It would also be an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in the NGS cloud prototype to find out more.

Remember you don't have to attend both days of the event, delegates are welcome to attend either day as a single day.

NGS Innovation Forum incoming!

We really are now in the run up to the third Innovation Forum which will take place on the 23rd - 24th November.

The final speaker for the event was announced a few weeks ago and we are pleased to welcome Andrew Lyall from the European Bioinformatics Institute who will be speaking about the European project ELIXIR.

We will also be providing a "Roaming RA" service at the Innovation Forum so if you would like to use the NGS but do not have a RA at your local institution from whom to obtain a grid certificate, come along to the IF! Not only will you obtain a grid certificate but you will also be able to meet NGS staff and hear about tools which will be of great use to you in running jobs. For more information on how to obtain a certificate at the event, see the instructions on our website.

If you are unable to attend the event you can hopefully follow us on Twitter. We will have a special tag for the event #ngsif10 so look out for this on your Twitter feeds. If you happen to Twitter about the NGS in general please use our tag #ukngs. Help us spread the word!

Remember registration closes on the 12th of November!

Gathering pace

Preparations for the NGS Innovation Forum are quickly gathering pace. Our call for poster abstracts closed on the 24th of September and the Programme Committee meeting to discuss the abstracts takes place tomorrow. If you have submitted an abstract for the event you will hear the outcome by the end of this week so watch your inbox!

I've also confirmed the last of the speakers so the agenda is now complete although missing one presentation title which will be with us very soon hopefully so watch this space...

In the meantime I can announce details of some other presentations at the event -

NGS site presentation - What the University of Westminster gained from being a NGS Partner Site - Gabor Terstyanszky, University of Westminster
The University of Westminster joined NGS in 2007 as a partner site. Being a partner site is very different than being a core site and this presentation will overview the challenges and experiences of the University of Westminster as a partner site. The presentation will also outline how we identify prospective users at the University of Westminster and what kind of application support and technical services we provide for local users to port and run their applications on NGS resources.

Federated Access to NGS resources - Mike Jones, NGS, University of Manchester
This talk will demonstrate how to use NGS resources using your institutional login credentials (via the UK Access Management Federation). It will describe how the UK's two main eScience authentication systems are combined to form an easy to use yet robust identity management environment. It will discuss how this mechanism links together with system, project and VO registration procedures.

The registration for the event will close on the 12th of November so make sure you register before then!

Attention, attention! Call for poster abstracts closes this Friday!

An extra special reminder that the Call for Poster Abstracts for the NGS Innovation Forum closes this Friday. If you or anyone you know would like to submit a poster abstract to this event please make sure that you submit your 200 word contribution to the NGS website by 5pm on Friday (24^th).

Remember that there will be a prize for the best poster as voted for by the delegates and all abstracts will be peer reviewed by the Innovation Forum Programme Committee. We would like to encourage all users to submit a poster and to attend the event in order to hear about the latest developments and tools from the NGS and also to leave with the knowledge of how to apply these tools in their research. Delegates are welcome to attend for one or both days of the event.

Registration for the event is also open now and further details are available on the event page on the NGS website.

Social Sciences and Humanities and the NGS Innovation Forum

We are pleased to say that Martin Wynne from the CLARIN project will be presenting at the forthcoming NGS Innovation Forum. We have a number of social scientists who use the NGS and this is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to the community how the NGS can be of relevance in this research area.

Martins presentation will look at what is necessary at the national level to support CLARIN, a European infrastructure providing services relating to language resources and tools to researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Continuing with the European theme we are also pleased to announce that Steven Newhouse, Director of EGI, will also be presenting at the event. Steven will be reflecting on the experiences of the first 6 months and provide an overivew for the plans that have now been established for future years.

Registration for the Innovation Forum is now open with full details available on the event page on the NGS website.

A flurry of activity

There has been a batch of new speakers recently announced for the NGS Innovation Forum '10 and further information about their presentations are now on the website. The latest presentations are NGS tool demos which will consist of walk-throughs of NGS tools using real research examples so delegates can leave the event with the knowledge of new tools to use in their research.

NGS tool demos
1. Transcriptome Analysis using the NGS User Interface /Workload Management System (UI/WMS) – Jonathan Churchill, NGS, STFC RAL
The UI/WMS is a tool which allows users to easily submit jobs to the whole of the NGS relying on the WMS to chose which NGS resources to use for their jobs. Use of the UI/WMS will be demonstrated with a user case study in which analysis time of mRNA was decreased from a month to less than 12 hours.

2. Accessing the NGS using the Application Hosting Environment (AHE) – Stefan Zasada, UCL
An overview of how access to the NGS can be simplified using the Application Hosting Environment, a lightweight application portal system.

3. Using the HERMES data management tool – David Wallom, NGS, University of Oxford
Here we will show how easy it is to install and connect into various NGS resources to move data between them, your home institution and your desktop.

4. The NGS from the CCP4 desktop – Matteo Turilli, NGS, University of Oxford
The NGS R&D theme have been working to build access to the NGS into the desktop tools that researchers use on a day-to-day basis, in this presentation we look at the example of CCP4: Software for Macromolecular X-Ray Crystallography.

We also have a presentation from the Director of the NGS -
The future of the NGS – Neil Geddes, NGS Director, STFC RAL
This presentation will look at the focus of activities for the NGS for the coming 2-3 years and possible longer term opportunities.

Remember that registration for the event is now open and that the call for poster abstracts closes on the 10th of September!

Registration for NGS Innovation Forum open now!

The registration for the NGS Innovation Forum is now open - details of how to register can be found on the event page on the NGS website.

We are pleased to announce another speaker for the event. Neil Geddes, director of the NGS, will be speaking about the future of the NGS so if you are a long term NGS user who wants to know the future direction of the NGS or a new user who is planning to use the NGS for the long term, then make sure you attend!

A reminder that we are still looking for NGS users to submit poster abstracts demonstrating how they use our resources in their research. The deadline for abstracts is the 10th of September so it's approaching soon! There are many benefits of submitting an abstract and attending the event -

• Walk through demos of new NGS tools
• NGS staff on-hand to answer your questions
• The opportunity to contribute and feedback to the future of the NGS
  
• The poster abstracts will be peer reviewed by the NGS IF'10 programme committee
• Publicity for your research both at the event and through accepted posters being placed on the NGS website
• The chance to win a prize as "best poster" as voted for by IF'10 delegates
  

All that is required is a short 200 word abstract! Of course you are more than welcome to attend the event without submitting an abstract and you can attend for one or both days. We hope you can come along!

Application hosting environment and UI/WMS - preparations continue!

I've just added some details of more presentations at the forthcoming Innovation Forum to the website. We have two demos - one of the UI/WMS which has proved to be a big hit with our users and the Application Hosting Environment (AHE). Full details of the presentations are available on our event page on the website. Delegates will see walk-throughs of how to use these tools on the NGS and the benefits they can bring to your research.

We have also updated the UI/WMS tutorials if you want to give the UI/WMS a go beforehand!

User success stories at the NGS

The programme for the 3rd NGS Innovation Forum is really beginning to come together now. I've managed to secure presentations from 3 NGS users from completely different research areas to talk about how they have used the NGS in their work.

First up we have Zhongwei Guan from the University of Liverpool who leads a research group where many researchers use the NGS. They research into the impact of explosions on aircraft fuselages as well blasts and impacts on concrete amongst many other things. I have seen Zhongwei speak at previous events and his presentations are colourful and interesting!

Next up in a complete change of direction, we have Luke Rendell from the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution at the University of St Andrews. Luke came to the NGS to ask for resources to run an international computer tournament on the evolution of learning. The tournament and results were so productive that the resulting paper was published in Science and was featured in New Scientist.

Finally, and by no means least, we have Narcis Fernandes-Fuentes who has used the NGS for several years to discover novel therapeutic agents. Narcis has had his research turned into a NGS user case study as an example of the type of research that can be performed on the NGS.

The deadline for poster abstracts for the event is approaching (10th Sept) so if you would like to submit an abstract and be in with a chance of winning the best poster prize, please submit soon!

Want to know how our databases work?

Then come along to the NGS Innovation Forum in November!

We have recently announced the details of our first few presentations with Simon Collins from the NGS team at the University of Manchester bravely giving two presentations.

His first presentation on day 1 will cover using databases on the NGS. It will give an overview of the databases supported on the NGS, what offerings and advantages these give to users and real-life case studies of how NGS users are taking advantage of this service.

Simon will also be giving a second presentation on day 2 aimed more at our member sites which will look at accounting services and solutions for NGS member sites. Current and potential sites will find out how accounting is supported on the NGS, the different choices available for sites to report accounting information and the information and tools that are available to sites that choose to do so.

Keep your eye on the NGS website over the next few weeks to see more details of presentations at the IF.

And relax

This time of year is always a bit quiet and it's an ideal opportunity to catch up on things and to get organised for the forthcoming conference season.

At the moment I've mainly been focusing on the organisation of the NGS Innovation Forum which will be held in November at STFC RAL.

One of the main new features of the IF will be a poster session on the Tuesday night which will enable NGS users to demonstrate how they have used NGS resources in their work. We're currently calling for abstracts and we'd like to strongly encourage all NGS users to submit a 200 word abstract for the event. There will also be a prize for the best poster as voted for by the delegates on the day.

Deadine for abstracts is the 10th of September!

I have also been busy confirming speakers so announcements will start appearing in the fortnightly email bulletin and on the website so keep an eye out on those! First announcement tomorrow (Friday) just to keep you all in suspense...

All the news on the forthcoming NGS IF'10

In an extraordinary show of organisation, I have just put up the agenda for this years NGS Innovation Forum even though it’s not until November – a whole 5 months away!

The reason for this organisation is mainly due to a wonderful programme committee for the event consisting of users, IT sys admins, Campus Champions and NGS staff members. We have put together what will hopefully be an interactive, engaging and thought provoking event where everyone will come away with some new found knowledge.

On the first day which is primarily aimed at users we will be showcasing some of the tools from the NGS such as the UI/WMS and Hermes. This will not be “death by PowerPoint” and instead NGS staff will demo the tools and walk you through using them from a users point of view. We will also be having a session where we can gather feedback from delegates about the NGS and respond to your comments.

If you’d like to come away from the event with more than new found knowledge be sure to submit a poster abstract for our poster session on the Tuesday evening. We are inviting all users to present a poster showcasing their research using the NGS and there will be prize for the best poster as voted for by the delegates.

The second day will be aimed more at IT staff, sys admins, research computing staff etc. There will be presentations from the “coal face” with a presentation from a NGS member site detailing their experience of working with us. We will also be focusing on the bigger picture by showing how the NGS can facilitate collaboration between research groups both nationally and internationally. This will be followed by presentations by large European multi-institution projects. We know that allowing external people to use your resources is a big responsibility so we have dedicated a session to “keeping track” which will also allow for discussion regarding accounting in institutions.

All in all we hope you will find the event both stimulating and informative. Keep an eye on here for registration opening and hopefully we’ll see you in November!

NGS Innovation Forum 2010 announced!

We have just announced the dates of this years NGS Innovation Forum which will be held at STFC RAL on the 23rd - 24th of November.

We have had two very successful events in Manchester and London so far with over 250 people attending. We hope to make the third event even better still with new opportunities for participants to be directly involved.

Again the event will be aimed at users, IT staff, researchers and others who are interested in the NGS and what it does. Participants have the option of attending for one or two days and accommodation is available on-site.

Watch this space for more details to be announced shortly regarding the programme but in the meantime make sure you put the date in your diary!