Fully funded e-infrastructure summer school anyone?

Yes it is that time of year again.  I've spent this morning opening registration for the 2012 SeIUCCR e-infrastructure summer school.  Why a whole morning you may ask?

Well by the time you've double and triple checked the registration form, put the web page live, sorted out the Facebook event page, written the advertising blurb, put together the news bulletin containing the announcement and tidied up another 101 loose ends, it takes a while!

The summer school is taking a similar format as last years successful event.  It will run from lunchtime Monday to lunchtime Thursday with a mix of presentations, hands on and consultation sessions.  It will cover cloud, grid and other e-infrastructures to ensure that attendees gain the widest possible knowledge of e-infrastructure in the UK.

The summer school is primarily aimed at UK engineering and physical science PhD students and post docs but researchers from other disciplines can also apply.  The school is fully funded including meals, accommodation and travel - all you have to do is tell us of a problem or issue in your research that could potentially be tackled by the application of e-infrastructure!

For more information and to apply for a place visit the event webpage.

It's that time of year again...

My inbox seems to be full of emails regarding conference calls for papers, early bird registrations, conference deadlines etc.  Yes it's conference preparation season and its in full swing!

I received confirmation today that I'll be giving a paper at the forthcoming EGI Community Forum on our champions networks.  I'll be talking about both our Campus and Community champion networks and how we work with each other to promote e-infrastructure in the UK.  Several other NGS staff have also had papers accepted on topics including "Linking Authenticating and Authorising Infrastructures in the UK NGI (SARoNGS)" (Mike Jones) and "Tweaking the Certificate Lifecycle for the UK eScience CA" (John Kewley).

Also in my inbox this week was an announcement from the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) announcing that registration for their Collaboration Workshop 2012 (CW) is now open.  This is on of my favourite events as, unlike most conferences, you don't sit passively listening.  The CW consists of breakout groups where you discuss topics submitted by the attendees and there's always one of interest to me in every session.  After the discussion a member of the break out group volunteers to report back to the CW as a whole.  This means that you get to hear what all the other break out groups were talking about and you can still feedback on their outcomes as well. 

It's a really lively meeting and you leave after 2 days feeling tired but feeling that you've achieved something worthwhile!  It's also a great place for networking with new people as there are researchers from a wide variety of research areas, IT people, community support people and people like myself who represent national initiatives.  To see some of the topics already suggested for discussion visit the event website.

NGS at SC'11 - round up

The UK presence was fairly significant this year at SC'11 with attendance by David Wallom, NGS Technical Director and a significant number of the leaders of research computing centres from around UK universities. This included NGS member sites @ Bristol, Leeds, Oxford, Southampton and EPCC.

In this blog post, David gives us a round up of NGS activities at this major computing event.

Having got off of the very long flight from Heathrow
to Seattle we settled onto the metro to get us  downtown. After passable sleep the following morning we headed over to the SC’11 venue – the Washington Convention Centre to collect our badges and then visit the workshop on HPC in Smart Grid, where there was UK interest from the EC FP7 HiPerDNO project being presented by Dr Stef Salvini, OeRC. Following a very productive day where we learnt the state of the art in US Smart grids, how they intend to utilize knowledge developed through the national e-infrastructure for research. We then met up with the EGI team who had an exhibition stand at the conference.

The Monday workshop, Many-Task computing on Grids and Clouds 2011,  started off with an interesting keynote from David Abramson (Monash) a long term friend of the NGS through support for their Nimrod tool which is popular with several of our biosciences users. After this there was a panel session which went slightly off topic to talk about exascale more than Many task but it still attracted several questions around the need for exascale, when we are still struggling to get a significant user base onto smaller HPC systems. Overall a good workshop though having the panel first did mean that a number of people didn’t hang around for the rest of the papers. This workshop was operating in a very competitive market with other sessions on cloud and data management which also attracted significant crowds.

The first full day of the conference allowed for the first good look around the exhibition floor alongside several interesting birds of a feather sessions There was also the  first of a number of conversations with different groups and vendors, including Microsoft, Mathworks and Adaptive Computing.  To give an idea of scale this picture is down one of the main aisles in one of the 5 rooms that were all about this size!!



Pretty impressive stands by a number of people
but the coolest was the multi projection globe on the NOAA stand.

We of course also announced
our activity with Globus Online which created a lot of interest and ended with us having a number of interesting conversations with NSF regarding future collaboration between our national e-infrastructures.





During the meeting the EGI booth was continually visited by a reasonably large number of people, we had the Real Time Monitor showing as normal (having seen a lot of 3D screens this needs to be done in 3d now for next year!). They did though give away a pretty large number of t-shirts as did a lot of stands, so I ended up as the moving poster board around down town  Seattle from 6:30-7am every morning on my morning run!

Getting ready for AHM 2011

Incase you aren't aware the dates for this year's UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2011 have been announced as the 26th - 29th of September. It will be held at the University of York and a Call for Papers has now been issued.

The main themes will be shared infrastructures, using the cloud in research, end-user engagement and applications (e-science, e-social science, research in the arts and humanities) ensuring an all encompassing meeting with something for everyone.

There are a number of themes to which papers can be submitted:

* Theme 1: Cloud computing for e-Research
* Theme 2: Shared Infrastructures, Systems and Tools for e-Research
* Theme 3: Applications and end-user engagement in e-Research
* Theme 4: Data-intensive Research
* Theme 5: Organisation, Trust, Security and Validation
* General Paper

As in previous years, authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers after AHM 2011 to be considered for inclusion in a special edition of a journal. The deadline for papers is the 23rd of May 2011.

There is also a call for workshops and tutorials as there is scheduled time for a limited number of half day workshops. The deadline for workshop proposals is 3rd April 2011 - please see the AHM website for further details.

NGS at the JISC conference

On Monday several of the NGS staff headed over to Liverpool for the annual JISC conference which was held in the rather impressive BT Convention Centre on the river front.
I was there early to get our stand set up and, once our furniture turned up and sticky stuff was obtained for the posters (even though we had been told the poster boards were velcro compatible!), we were ready to go.

It was good to see so many familiar faces at the event even though for us the JISC conference is a bit of an "oddity" as it doesn't contain a huge number of our target audience. We had a chance to catch up with some collaborators from different parts of the country including Northern Ireland and Scotland and of course our JISC funders.

Tuesday morning saw our parallel session take place entitled "Increasing research efficiency through the NGS" with two gues speakers. Our technical director, David Wallom, opened the session with a brief presentation on what the NGS is / does and also covered our Cloud resources which are definitely a hot topic at the moment!

Our guest speakers were Ian Dunlop, University of Manchester, who presented "e-Infrastructure for Social Science data: Obesity e-Lab & MethodBox" and Susana Sansone, University of Oxford, who presented "ISA Infrastructure - Standards and Software for Annotating, Managing and Sharing Life Science Investigations". Copies of both their presentations are available from the "goodie bag" page for the NGS session.

Full details of the JISC annual conference including all the presentations from the event can be found on the JISC conference event page.

Castles, case studies and lightning

Last week I attended the Software Sustainability Institutes Collaboration Workshop in Edinburgh. As with previous meetings this event was very enjoyable with a great deal of discussion, actions and collaboration taking part.

The organisers had revamped the programme for this year’s event and one of the changes was the inclusion of “lightning talks”. The set up was interesting with each presenter having 5 minutes and one slide which shared the screen with a rather large countdown clock. It certainly kept the presenters on their toes and the attention of the audience! Unfortunately given the nature of the presentations you really had to be there to appreciate the talks but some presenters did manage to get a lot of info on their slides. In particular the slides from Taverna, STFC, software preservation, soundsoftware.ac.uk, e-science central, SPRINT, Hartree Institute and Youshare.ac.uk are worth a look. I have linked to the websites for each project where they exist but for the slides, visit the materials section.

After the a lovely lunch it was time to start what I think is the most enjoyable part of the workshops – the breakout sessions. Before the event, delegates have the opportunity to submit topics that they would like to discuss at the breakout sessions and then at the event people vote on what topics they would like to discuss. The delegates break into groups and disappear off to various parts of the building to discuss the topic. Each group has a chair, a scribe and someone who “volunteers” to report back but quite often people take on two of these roles.

I attended the session on preparing case studies to support cases for funding which was rather apt as I prepare the NGS user case studies. There were about 7 of us from a variety of backgrounds including funding council reps and the discussion covered areas such as different types of case studies, ways that case studies could contribute to REF, how to format case studies and much more. It was a very interesting hour and we did come up with several suggestions for further work for the SSI.

The second breakout session of the day took place after some caffeine had been consumed and this time I attended the session on “measuring the research impact of software”. Unfortunately the notes from this aren’t up on the SSI website yet but when they are I will make sure I update the link!

So that was day 1 at the CW11. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about the conference dinner so I’ll leave that out and write up day 2 very soon!

Are you a researcher looking for a partner?

If so then you really should consider coming to the dating event of the year! Well okay it’s not quite a dating event but matchmaking is definitely part of the plan of the Software Sustainability Institutes Collaboration Workshop.

It will be held in Edinburgh at the beginning of March and is described as “the perfect opportunity to meet the researchers, software developers, funders and other software experts that can help you advance your research”.

If you are a researcher who uses software but could do with some help from a computer scientist to make the most of your software, come along and advertise yourself and your situation / problem. You can give a lightning talk or present a poster and then work through the issue with other attendees in small break out groups.

There have already been some break out group discussion topics suggested BUT one of the best things about this meeting is that the agenda constantly changes depending on the interests of the attendees, the emergence of new discussion threads and tangents. There’s never a dull moment!

I’ve attended several of these meetings and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every single one. No death by PowerPoint and plenty of discussion and positive solutions instead! The constantly changing agenda works really well as we report back to the assembled attendees after every session and then decide on the next set of discussion topics. I’ve always met new and interesting people and came away fully enthused.

If you are a developer there are some free places up for grabs but the deadline is this Friday (18th Feb) so don’t delay!

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!

Centralising your IT support - thoughts from the JISC Conference

Last Tuesday the NGS was out on the road with an exhibition stand at the JISC Future of Research conference which was held in London and online.

As well as speaking to delegates browsing the exhibition stands, I also went to some very interesting parallel sessions. The first session I attended was “Centralising your IT Support for Research” and consisted of 3 presentations including Mary Visser, Director of IT from the University of Leicester. Mary talked about how researchers want “free at point of use” as funders are unwilling to pay FEC for these, seeing IT as basic facilities which should be provided by the institution. Leicester currently have an IT research liaison manager who speaks to researchers about their IT needs and provides guidance and advice about local and national resources. Sounds like something that many of our users would like!

Mary’s presentation for a centralised IT support service was countered by Rob Procter from Manchester e-Research Centre who argued the case for more distributed IT provision within schools and departments. Rob pointed out that many researchers do not trust IT services to provide what they need as they are teaching focused with most of their effort going in this direction rather than towards research. Robs argument for embedding IT staff in departments is certainly one I’ve heard many times before and I’ve also seen some very good results and collaborations come out of these situations.

Here at the NGS we realise that not all universities have IT services that can help with grid computing or even the use of computing in research. The NGS can’t have technical staff based in every institution in the country but we do have a variety of means to try and help from afar.

Check this list to see if you have a local Campus Champion who can provide some advice or support to you in your institution. If you don’t have a Campus Champion, we have our helpdesk where knowledgeable staff can answer your queries by email. We also have a variety of tutorials to talk you through getting started and running jobs. If there is anything else you would find useful regards training material then please let us know!

Gearing up for AHM

Yes I know it may seem like a long way away but the preparation for this years All Hands Meeting has already started at the NGS. The call for papers has been out for a while and eventually (after the 2nd extension) closed on Monday. Registration was opened last Wednesday so if you feel like being organised you can register now! I imagine that a lot of people will be waiting to see if their papers are accepted before registering.

There will be a good turn out from the NGS as always with several papers submitted from our team and an exhibition stand publicising the NGS and the NGI in conjunction with GridPP. I'm not sure what we'll be demo-ing on our stand yet but I''m sure it will be something exciting.

As many people know the AHM unfortunately clashes with the inaugural EGI meeting in Amsterdam but all is not lost as there are direct flights several times a day from Cardiff to Amsterdam so it may be possible to attend both meetings!

I'm just glad that the AHM has moved back to September as it means that I have the quieter months of July and August to get everything ready for the event!

Free places at the TransferSummit

Thanks to colleagues at the OSS Watch there are a couple of free places for academics to attend this years TransferSummit.

If you haven't been before (or heard of it!), it's an opportunity for academics, the research community and business executives to talk about the requirements, challenges, and opportunities in the use, development, licensing, and future of Open Source technology.

This isn't your usual "death by PowerPoint" conference either. There will be three tracks, a Gala Dinner and a BarCamp over the 2 days ensuring that everyone has a good chance to contribute to the discussion.

If you'd like to attend then please email OSS Watch to obtain a discount code.

Time has not yet run out

If you were thinking about submitting an abstract to the UK All Hands Meeting but hadn't quite got round to submitting anything then time is still on your side!

The deadline has been extended to the 7th of June so there is still time to work on an abstract. This will be the 9th AHM meeting and every year more and more NGS users come to present their work.

As well as being an opportunity to meet the e-infrastructure providers, AHM also gives users the opportunity to feedback directly to tool developers and see what the latest developments are in e-infrastructure - basically the tools that they will be using in the future.

As if you needed another incentive, authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers (after the conference) to be considered for inclusion in a special edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (the conference proceedings will not be published).

So if you'd like to join us in Cardiff this September, make sure you get your abstract in by the 7th of June!

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!

Let's get together

And so back from the OMII-UK collaborative workshop which took place in Edinburgh Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Like last years event, it was a really interesting and productive 2 days with many actions resulting from the in-depth discussion groups. The great thing about the workshop is that it's not death by PowerPoint. The sessions are discussions sessions where delegates chose from a range of topics, disappear off into groups in various parts of NeSC and then after an hour everyone reconvenes and reports back their findings. Importantly it's not just findings but short-term and long-term actions that are reported back!

Unsurprisingly as the NGS outreach person, I attended several sessions on collaboration and was the "report back" person for the session on "assistance with publicity, outreach and dissemination"which had a healthy audience (obviously a pertinent topic!).

There were many findings over the past two days and these can be found ordered by session on the event website. However the one that really stuck in my mind was something that was raised by several of the researchers who attended the meeting.

They have things they need done which they can't do themself eg code written, advice on optimising or tweaking existing software. They need computer scientists for this but they don't know how to "hook up" with them for want of a better description! The things they need done quite often aren't large projects and may only take a few weeks or less but they don't know where to go for help, who to approach and who is best suited for the job.

Several possible ways of tackling this problem were suggested at the event and if you are interested in the ideas that came up, the slides from this particular topic can be found on the website under - "Long-term researcher-driven collaborations" and "Collaboration 2". This was such a popular topic that we ended up with 2 discussion sessions.

So the question is for those research scientists out there who work with computer scientists - how did you hook up? How did you get together and form a collaboration?

AHM kicks off

It’s been a hectic day so far at AHM - the first thing I had to do today as soon as I walked in the venue was to find a presentation for someone to use as they were standing in for a NGS user who was ill. Luckily thanks to our shiny new website a suitable presentation was found and they made their slot with minutes to spare. A huge thank you to Shiv and Dave F for stepping in at the last minute with a presentation on using the NGS for in-silico drug screening.

The exhibition area where the NGS has a booth has been particularly busy. We had our first demo this afternoon on the NGS booth and I am pleased to say that it was extremely busy. Photos will follow tomorrow to prove this! The UI/WMS demo was given by Jonathan Churchill and was very popular with people staying way past the demo slot to ask more questions and find out more. More information on the user interface / work management system (UI/WMS) can be found on the NGS website.

This evening brings the poster session and the journey back into Oxford to find and check into our accommodation for the week.

Busy

It’s all been a bit busy here at the NGS this week as many of us are off to the AHM and e-science conference in Oxford next week. The NGS will be sharing a large double stand with our colleagues at GridPP so it should be fun!

We have some demos on the stand so be sure to pop past and see what’s going on. We have demos of the new UI/WMS, the Digital Library and SARoNGS on which we would really like your feedback.

The NGS will also be hosting a Birds of a Feather meeting on the Monday night 4.30pm - 6pm on the topic of "Services to support EU projects through the NGS" so come along!

So the stand rota is done, the leaflets are packed, the posters are printed, the stand presentation is almost done and the only thing that’s left now is to write my own talk that I’m giving on Tuesday!

I’ll be at both conferences so I’ll be in Oxford Monday – Friday – I hope it’s a good one as that’s a long stretch!

If you can’t make the conferences you can keep up to date through the wonders of blogging. Various NGS staff should be blogging from the events and myself and Claire will also be blogging for the GridCast team along with Manisha (from GridTalk) and Neasan from GridPP.

Everyone's calling

There seems to have been a rash of "Calls for Papers" recently - everyone planning for 2010 I guess! They are up on the new NGS website if you want more information but in short we have EGEE User forum in Uppsala, Sweden, OGF28 in Munich, Germany and ISGC in Taiwan.

The NGS is also beginning to plan for 2010 as we are already dealing with roadshow requests for next Easter and looking attending a range of events and conferences next year. If there is an event you know of either through attending or organising then please let us know about it!

We are also keen to hear from people who are presenting work that was done using NGS resources. The new website has a much better area for showcasing research performed on the NGS and I would like to make the most of this. If you have anything you'd like to tell us about or share with us then please contact me through the NGS helpdesk (support(@)grid-support.ac.uk).

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).

#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.