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!

Innovation writeup part 1

Another successful NGS Innovation Forum. It was good to hear Real Users™ stand up and say they love the NGS (no, really!) and to tell us about all the interesting work they are doing. (Slides should appear on the agenda page shortly, Gillian is busy chasing people.)

Highlights will always be a personal choice - Jason already mentioned CVMFS. There are many interesting bits one could mention, so let's focus on one in this post: authentication.

We demonstrated the CertWizard on behalf of the dev team, and despite being a live demo, it was 100% successful. This tool will make it much easier to manage certificates: browsers were built for a lot of different things, including e-commerce, so managing certificates with browsers can be challenging. Managing credentials with this tool will be much easier, and even fun.

Speaking of easy credentials, Mike talked about Shibboleth access to the NGS (aka SARoNGS). SARoNGS is not new, but it is still changing access to services. For example, we have demonstrated login to Jason's nodes in Leeds using SARoNGS credentials.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that we are collaborating with JANET on demonstrating Project Moonshot. This project is again about federated access but at a "lower" layer than Shibboleth - Shib is very web (or HTTP) oriented which is very useful, but Moonshot aims at other services like ssh (or at the Moon.) Expect more blog posts as we make progress.

Ultimately all this authentication stuff should benefit all end users who will have a choice of how to access their services.

Unable to attend the NGS IF10?

If you are unable to attend the NGS Innovation Forum next week, we hope to keep you up to date with interesting points, discussions etc through the medium of Twitter and this blog!

I will be encouraging all delegates to Twitter with the tag #ngsif10 and of course the regular bloggers will hopefully be in action on here.

The presentations from the event will be available on the NGS website after the event along with pdfs of the posters from the Tuesday evening poster session.

If there is anything else you would like to see us do to keep you up to speed with developments at the event then please let us know!

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!

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!

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.

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!

Wish you were here

For those of you not at the Innovation Forum, you are missing lots of interesting presentations and discussions. Applications, clouds, outreach, "campus champions", EGI, and more. Oh, and real research. I encourage you to see the slides if and when they're available.

In my areas of expertise, I note in particular the requirements for data management and identity management. On the latter, we are working to improve the way certificates are managed in various stages of their lifetime; recent developments in the IGTF will, for once, help make some things easier. The CA will be modernised. And SARoNGS will of course also be available.

For data management, it is interesting to note the very different requirements of communities: security, performance, volume, metadata, filesize, etc. The good thing about the NGS is we're stronger together. For a new community, to solve their problems themselves would take a long time, but using infrastructure set up for other communities makes things much easier.

Day 1 at the NGS Innovation Forum '09

Nearly the end of the first day of the NGS Innovation Forum ’09. From an organisers point of view it’s gone okay – all the speakers turned up, everyone was fed and watered and we have a good mix of people here.

The day kicked off with an introduction from the NGS Executive Director Andrew Richards who used some interesting analogies (London underground and shipping containers!) to describe the past, present and future of the NGS.

Next up was David Fergusson from the NeSC training team who talked us through the life cycle of a job on the NGS including birth, mating and death accompanied by some of his own great photos– very interesting!

After a lively coffee break it was time for the break out sessions which, judging by the amount of talking, were lively and constructive. Half way through the sessions everyone swapped to the second session so well done everyone for finding your place! I’m looking forward to the feedback sessions later on from the groups to see what was said and the issues that were raised.

Another coffee break and back in for a presentation from Steve Newhouse, Director of EGI who talked about the European future which is currently the presentation I’m sitting in!

So a great day so far with a lot of discussion and a lot of interesting issues raised! Wonder what tomorrow will bring?

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).

Are you involved in any of these areas?

For the first time the NGS Innovation Forum will feature break out sessions devoted to particular topics. These have proved to be very popular with those already registered so get in quick before your particular topic fills up!

We have everything from research community related sessions to more generic sessions on day to day research problems. ITS staff needn't feel left out as we also have topics for you! The full list is-

• Data handling and integration
• Site integration with the NGS
• Software licensing
• User support
• molecular modelling
• bioinformatics
• social sciences
• human biology

Further suggestions are welcome and they can be added to this list.

The Innovation Forum will be held in London on the 21st - 22nd of October and, although the event is free to attend, registration is required. You can register at this site - just make sure you do so before the deadline of the 14th of October!

The Magical NGS

A heads up for your diary here!

Following the very successful Innovation Forum held at MoSI last November, the dates have been confirmed for the next annual NGS Innovation Forum. IF'09 will take place on the 21st - 22nd of October at the Magic Circle Headquarters in London. Yes that Magic Circle!

The venue is literally steps away from Euston train station and only 10 minutes from Kings Cross and St. Pancras. We will have the entire venue to ourselves for both days of the event and there are sure to be some surprises in store!

If you were unable to attend the last IF, catch up with what you missed through the wonders of technology! The agenda and some of the presentations from the previous IF are available here, videos of the presentations are available here and photos from the event are available on our Flickr site.

I bet you never thought you'd see a photo of Paul Daniels on a grid computing blog did you?

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!