Are you a molecular modeller?

Two free training events announced in the space of 2 weeks?  Don't say we're not good to you!

Incase you missed it, last week I announced that we were accepting applications for our "Using e-infrastructure for Research" summer school which will be held in August.  It's completely totally and utterly fully funded so there is absolutely no cost to the participants.  More information can be found on our website.

However the latest event I have to tell you about today is being organised by one of our Community Champions who is funded through the same project as the above summer school - Supporting e-Infrastructure Uptake through Community Champions for Research (SeIUCCR) funded by EPSRC.

Dr Pamela Greenwell, who is based at the University of Westminster, has organised a 3 day training event entitled "Biobytes", a molecular modelling event for bioscientists.  It's a 3 day event held at Westminster consisting of breakout groups, seminars, demos and practical workshops.

For more information and details on how to register, see the event page on the NGS website.  Don't delay as spaces are limited!

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.

A long long time ago... or so it seems

Before the mayhem of the September conference season was upon us, the NGS ran a successful summer school at the beginning of the month.  The e-infrastructure summer school was part of the SeIUCCR project.  You can read more about the background to the summer school and project in my blog post from the beginning of August.

We had over 25 students join us down in Coesner's House in Abingdon for 4 days and they came from a wide variety of backgrounds.  We had students who were in their first year or two of their PhD as well as post docs and they came from Edinburgh to Essex and everywhere inbetween.

So how was the summer school?  Was it a success?  Did the students learn and enjoy it?

Well the best people to ask are the students themselves.  All the students were asked to provide us with feedback and some were even willing to write a few more words.

Ed Day from Canterbury Christ Church University attended the summer school and this is what he had to say:

"The recent SeIUCCR Summer School was a very enjoyable and informative experience. As a newcomer to grid research I found the the summer school extemely useful. It contained some important introductory pieces as well as covering many topics in more depth suitable for anyone wishing to use the NGS. Sessions consisted of a good mix of high level overviews and hands-on practicals such as using the P-GRADE portal.

The presenters were very knowledgable and helpful and were eager to inform on all aspects of grid computing. Some sessions involved the speakers talking individually with attendees and I found the staff gave useful advice and were very supportive of my project.

Before the school I thought my particular research area, the forensic investigation of mobile phones, might be a good fit for grid computing, and by the end of the summer school I felt much more able to pursue my research in an informed manner using the NGS. It was useful to know how grid, cloud and high performance computing relate to one another  and over the four days I feel I became much more aware, in a less naive way, of how my research would benefit from the resources the NGS has to offer. In particular I learnt to think about my research differently: how my phone investigation process would be best able to benefit from a grid architecture.

Indeed the school helped support my view that the NGS would be a good resource for ANY project that needs HPC not just vast number crunching modelling applications such as those such by molecular biologists or quantum level physicists (although of course it is good for that too).

I liked the food too!"

And it wasn't just Ed who enjoyed the summer school!

"The summer school has been a fascinating activity. The hands on sessions have familiarized us with HPC/Grid/Cloud, which are useful resourses that I have never had access to or known how to access, whilst the Meeting Champions and Q&A sessions made it possible for us to know how these resourses could facilitate our research. The SeiUCCR summer school provides a great opportunity of learning, communicating and networking. I would like to thank all the people who made this summer school possible"

"The summer school was a relaxed and friendly environment. It provided detailed information about the various resources available to researchers both in terms of computer resources and support. The staff where very approachable and keen to show an interest in the attendees work. Overall it was a great experience I would recommend to anyone who has an interest in grid/cloud/HPC or who's work may benefit from such technologies."


For anyone who was unsuccessful in obtaining a place at the e-infrastructure summer school, the presentations are now available online.  Due to receiving over 120 applications for the summer school and only having a limited number of places, I know many people were keen to see the presentations.

There will be another summer school in 2012 so watch this space for forthcoming announcements next year!

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!

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!

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!

e-Research, e-science, grid, cloud?

No matter what you call it we want to know about your events! We now have an online event submission form for you to submit your events for inclusion on the NGS website.

We know that there are more events taking place that you can keep track of so we aim to include the most relevant ones on our website to make it easier for you.

We want to help organisations advertise their events to our user community and anyone who just happens to be browsing our website! Our user community consists of researchers from all research areas, from the social sciences to particle physics and we also have a large number of people from the more the technical side of the grid such as university IT sys admins etc.

Obviously as we are based in the UK and funded by UK organisations, we really want to hear about UK events or events where a large number of UK people will be in attendance. However all submissions will be considered! All events will be checked to see that they are appropriate for inclusion on the website.

So if you have an event which is e-research related then simply fill in our event submission form and let us know!

Can you get your message across?

At the recent OMMI-UK Collaborations workshop, I was involved in the dissemination and outreach session which is hardly surprising as the NGS outreach person! However one of the topics that came up was that people felt they lacked the necessary skills to do outreach, be it getting their message across clearly to communities outwith their own, writing articles other than scientific papers or even just getting peoples attention!

Plans were already afoot at the NGS to tackle this problem as it was an issue that we had previously identified within the community. We are now pleased to say that registration for the event is now open and further details can be found on the NGS website.

The event is designed to give attendees the skills to communicate their work on a non-technical level, clearly and confidently to a wide range of audiences. The event is aimed at everyone who needs to get their message across be it to research peers, students and potential clients within the university community etc.

The event will be held at STFC RAL, Didcot, on the 11th of May and we hope to see you there!

Want to come and meet us?

We're running a couple of NGS roadshows this month with the first one taking place this Thursday in Hull. This one is fully booked but we do have another event at Canterbury Christ Church University on the 25th which is open to everyone and also includes a training event so if you want some hands on training of using the NGS, sign up!

David Fergusson who looks after training for the NGS is also taking part in a JISC new technologies event at Liverpool John Moores University on the 19th of February where you can hear about the NGS as well as other infrastructure and Web 2.0 services from JISC.

Both of these events are free to attend but registration is required.

Eventually I get this posted...

There have been some major teething problems with the wireless and wired connections here at AHM / IEEE. Thankfully they seem to have been fixed so here is the blog post I wrote yesterday!

This morning I was in the User Engagement session for two main reasons. User engagement is one of the main purposes of my job and the second reason is that I was giving a presentation during this session!

The session kicked off with Alistair Sutcliffe from Manchester talking about user engagement with health informatics. He specifically talked about user tool development and the involvement the eventual users had in the development process. Next up was a fellow NGS staff member Kevin Haines who gave a more technical focused talk on how users can access NGS resources using SSH enabled clients. Good publicity for the NGS again.

I was next up and you couldn’t really get a more different presentation from Kevins! My talk focused on the outreach methods that I use at the NGS to tell people about the NGS and the methods we use for gathering feedback from our users etc. I covered topics such as our popular roadshows where we go out to institutions and give presentations to potential users, our new Campus Champions scheme, innovation forum, our new website, the Communities service which was launched last week and our annual user survey. A lot to cover in 20 mins but I made it! There were a lot of good questions at the end which asked for more detail and I got to talk for longer about a subject that I get really enthusiastic about!

After lunch (better than yesterday!) I attended the social sciences and humanities session returning to my first job in grid computing many moons ago. Peter Halfpenny from the University of Manchester talked about the e-social science agenda. Peter started off with describing NCeSS and its objectives and the initial lack of demand for grid computing by social scientists. Things however have moved on and social scientists are no longer frightened of the grid. However now looking to the future the social scientists are now asking questions about the sustainability of the tools that have been produced. Who will look after these tools, who will look after them and who will support them? These questions need to be answered and people are looking towards the funding bodies.

So tonight is the conference dinner in the centre of Oxford and a chance to catch up with all those colleagues that I’ve not yet had a chance to chat to and there are quite a few! It’s almost the end of day 2 and it seems to have gone pretty quickly already.

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.

Digging for the right information?

Our colleagues at NaCTeM (National Centre for Text Mining) are holding a workshop entitled "Text Mining for Scholarly Communications and Repositories" which will take place on the 28th - 29th October at the Manchester Interdisciplinary BioCentre, University of Manchester. The Workshop is being co-hosted by NaCTeM and UKOLN.

There will be a keynote presentation entitled "eScience and Semantic Computing" given by Professor Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft External Research - a name familiar to many in the UK e-science community!

A full Programme of international speakers and the registration form is now available at the event website.

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).

e-Social Science in Germany

Tomorrow I am off to Cologne for the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science which is organised by the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) based at the University of Manchester.

I've had the pleasure of attending 3 out of the previous 4 of these conferences and they have always been very interesting showing the breadth of research in the social sciences using grid technology.

Many of the UK researchers who will be presenting their work over the next few days are users of the NGS. The NGS will have an exhibition stand at the event in conjunction with EGEE so pop over and say hello!

Hopefully I will find time to blog about some of the presentations during the conference so watch this space!

The past and the future

It's all go at the UK e-Science AHM headquarters at the moment.

In addition to the call for papers that we announced earlier this week, the first volume of the Proceedings from AHM 2008 have now been released.

The issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences is entitled 'Crossing boundaries: computational science, e-Science and global e-Infrastructure I. Selected papers from the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2008’ compiled by P. V. Coveney and M. P. Atkinson I:28 June 2009; Vol. 367, No. 1897

One paper in particular highlights how the use of NGS resources has assisted in the planning of radiotherapy treatment by reasearchers at the Velindre Cancer Centre in Cardiff.

The volume is now available online here with the second instalment coming soon so watch this space!

A week of e-science in Oxford

The ever popular UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM) has just released a call for papers which is available here.

The AHM is now in its 8th year and has been moved from its traditional September slot to December so it can co-exist with the IEEE e-Science meeting which will also be taking place in Oxford. The AHM will take place from Monday 7th December until Wednesday 9th of December with IEEE being held on the 9th – 11th of December.

You can therefore spend an entire week in Oxford listening to the latest developments in e-science!

The IEEE event also has a call for papers out and details can be found here.

Advanced Distributed Services Summer School 2009

The NGS in conjunction with the Training, Outreach and Education team at NeSC are running an Advanced Distributed Services Summer School (ADSSS 09) on the 7th – 11th September at Cosener’s House , Oxfordshire.

The sessions will be taken by many of the leading researchers and technology providers in the field of Distributed Computing in the UK so it is a chance for students to take part in a unique learning experience in this field (including a large component of hands on tutorials) but also to spend a week in a small group with the leaders in the field!

The aim of the school is to help develop the skills of those involved in providing computational support for research in a wide range of disciplines.

In particular the school will focus on the use of, provision of interfaces to and the development of services based on employing the composition or aggregation of computational or data services.
Topics covered include how to compose a variety of services into bioinformatics work flows which can be used to support biomedical research processes, how to use and develop lab or department scale clusters of computers to run simulations, how to work with the NGS to compose protein simulation models for running on UK or international super computers, developing a portal to support legacy applications.

Further information on the summer school can be found on the ADSSS website or email adsss09@lists.nesc.ac.uk.

Registration is now open and the cost of the summer school including accomodation and meals (except Tuesday and Thursday) is £276.

NGS on the Road!

Earlier this week the NGS roadshow team travelled to Aston University to host a roadshow event for staff and students. The event was well attended with 25 people in attendance ranging from PhD students to ITS staff.

The talks covered topic such as what is the NGS?, getting started with the NGS and the NGS portal and job submission. There was also a presentation from one of our users – Jonathan Mitchell from the University of Leeds bravely stepped in after our original presenter couldn’t make it at the last minute. Jonathan talked about using NGS resources to understand the folding of DNA and showed some rather impressive animations.

The presentations created a great deal of discussion which carried over into lunch. There was plenty of NGS associated staff on hand to answer questions including David Wallom (NGS technical director), David Fergusson (NeSC Deputy Director of Training, Outreach and Education) and Hamza Mehammed (NeSC Senior Trainer). I was also there in my role as NGS Liaison Officer.

The feedback collected from the day was very positive with the majority of people planning on using NGS resources in the future as well as the majority of people planning on telling their colleagues etc about the NGS.

The NGS roadshow events are free to host as the NGS covers the cost of catering and staff travel. All the local institution has to do is book a room and help to advertise the event locally. The roadshows can be held just for the host institute or people from surrounding institutes can be invited as well. If you’d like to know more about the roadshows then please see the website or contact Gillian Sinclair, the NGS Liaison Officer (Gillian.sinclair(at)manchester.ac.uk).