EGI User Forum round up

Last week saw many NGS staff attend the EGI User Forum 2011 which was held in Vilnius, Lithuania. Many NGS staff attending were actively involved in sessions either chairing or presenting as well as helping out on the UK NGI (UK National Grid Initiative) exhibition stand.
Personally my main involvement was ensuring that the UK NGI exhibition stand got there in one piece and that staff from NGS and GridPP were on hand to answer questions from delegates about our organisation. We had a very busy stand – possibly one of the busiest we’ve had at these events which was good to see.

I was also presenting at the EGI Dissemination session which was chaired by Neasan O’Neill, NGI Dissemination Coordinator. Neasan had asked some of the more established NGI’s to discuss the dissemination methods they had found most useful and effective. I presented on the NGS roadshows of which there have been 12. I discussed the content of a typical roadshow, the feedback we receive directly after the event and the follow up I do approximately 3 months after the event.

I also ran through (very quickly!) the other dissemination methods we have including our user case studies, our quarterly newsletter and the innovation forums. There were quite a few questions and some good discussion after the presentations with quite a few leaflets disappearing from the stand as well which meant less to carry home!

The conference was excellent in general with a brilliant venue and fantastic organisation. The next EGI event is the Technical Forum which will take place in Lyon in France on the 19th – 23rd September 2011.

NGS roadshow event at the University of Huddersfield

Last week saw the NGS outreach team at the University of Huddersfield for a NGS roadshow event. The local organiser was Ibad Kureshi who did a fantastic job of organising everything locally and making the day went smoothly. Ibad also did a great job of advertising the event locally meaning that we had over 30 participants at the morning roadshow and over 20 registered for the afternoon training event.

The roadshow kicked off in the usual fashion with an overview of the NGS from our Technical Director, David Wallom from the University of Oxford. Many people in the audience were not familiar with the NGS before the event or had just heard our name mentioned but were unaware of what the NGS actually does so this presentation is designed as a gentle introduction!

Following David we moved onto presentations from NGS users including Paul Martin who is a researcher at the University of Huddersfield. Paul has been using the NGS for computer modelling of thoria in order to determine its suitability for a next generation nuclear fuel. He explained how he has used DL_POLY 2 which scales very well on the NGS. Paul in particular praised the good on-line instructions/training, FAQ’s, blog and helpdesk/support which is great to hear!

Paul was followed by another user, Matt Smith from the University of Liverpool. Ibad had suggested that a presentation by an Abaqus user would go down very well due to the interest in this software package at Huddersfield. We were happy to oblige! Matt spoke about his use of Abaqus on the NGS to model lattice structures. This was a very interesting talk helped by the sample materials Matt brought along to illustrate his presentation. As Ibad had thought, Matt’s presentation prompted plenty of questions about his usage of the NGS and about his research.

David Fergusson from the training team at NeSC then elaborated on how users actually get started on the NGS and how to apply for a certificate, run jobs etc. Again there were plenty of questions showing that Huddersfield researchers are keen to use our resources!

The final presentation was by Ibad who outlined the locally available resources and how these tied in with the resources offered by the NGS. We’ve found in previous roadshows that having presentations about local resources helps the audience to visualise how the NGS fits in locally and that it is there to complement existing resources.

All the presentations from the event are available on the NGS website from the event page.

Arts and Humanities and ICT

Following on from my previous blog post about the JISC- Future of Research? conference, the next parallel session I attended was “Evolution and Revolution in ICT and Arts and Humanities research”.

The first presenter was Simon Tanner from King’s College London who spoke about some JISC digitised collections. No slides from this one I’m afraid as he showed us pretty pictures instead!

The next speaker was from Mimas who spoke about “long tails and efficiencies of scale”. The slides for this one are available and of particular relevance to myself and the NGS, was the observation that services have to show –

• User demand
• Benefits
• Impact and value
• Sustainability

This is something that the NGS has been undertaking recently and will continue to do so as we come up for refunding next year. You may have seen a small flurry of stats etc on the website and we have been undertaking more stats gathering behind the scenes from the proliferation of data available from usage stats and user applications. From this we are building up a picture of user demand, impact and value etc.

We hope that our users will help us by contributing to our forthcoming annual user survey and our follow up roadshow survey. If you have attended any NGS roadshows we would be grateful if you could complete the short survey which will take about a minute to complete! This will help us shape future roadshow events and also analyse the benefits that users get from attending these events.

The final speaker was John Coleman from the University of Oxford who presented on “Large Scale Computational Research in Arts and Humanities”. He started with an interesting fact that in 2008 YouTube was the second most popular search engine with people looking for speech / audio instead of text. He is currently working on a JISC funded project to “mine a year of speech” which aims to annotate a years worth of data in the form of a corpus. To do this he is currently using about 20 computers set up as a cluster in a local lab. However he is now looking at placing the data in several other universities which he says is “like grid computing”. John also highlighted a report available on "ICT Tools for searching, annotation and analysis of audiovisual material" which may be of interest to people.

The JISC Future of Research? conference had some very interesting parallel sessions and I hope it continues next year!

NGS training event

The NGS will be holding a roadshow event at the University of York on the 20th of April. As well as the usual roadshow agenda there will also be a hands on training event taking place in the afternoon. The event is open to everyone who is interested in finding out more about the NGS and using our resources.

If you would like to attend the event make sure you register before the 13th of April!

Blowing your trumpet!

So two NGS roadshows last week down south and both went very well! It's always nice to see our users present their work as it's the best way to really find out what you are all up to out there! Quite often the research presented is literally hot off the machine so the roadshow audiences are getting a truly up to the minute view of research being performed on the NGS.

As the liaison officer it's my job to let the world know what the NGS and it's users are up to so we can advertise your research and our resources through a wide variety of publications, events etc. We have recently had some of our users research featured in SCW (the role of geographic isolation and dispersal limitation in generating high endemic plant species diversity) and in iSGTW in an article on "Supporting the arts and humanities with e-science".

We also feature our users research on our website in our case studies section, posters, research papers etc. If you have anything you would like added into these sections (particularly the research paper section) then please contact me at support@grid-support(dot)ac(dot)uk.

South way south

Tomorrow sees three NGS staff head way south to Canterbury for a NGS roadshow event which will be held at Christ Church Canterbury University or CCCU for short!

As well as the usual NGS staff in attendance we will also have two NGS users who will be speaking about their research using the NGS. Paul Townend from the University of Leeds will be speaking about the use of NGS in the social sciences while Sulman Sarwar will be speaking about the use of NGS in the humanities. It should be a very interesting event and something slightly different!

Meanwhile if you would like to see the presentations from our last roadshow event which was held at the University of Hull these are now available on the event website.

And coincidentally some social science research using NGS resources was mentioned in this recent iSGTW article entitled "Supporting the arts and humanities with e-science".

NGS heads East

Yesterday NGS staff from the length and breadth of the country headed to the University of Hull to hold a NGS roadshow event.

Our local host was Dr Helen Wright from the SimVis Research Group in the Department of Computer Science. Helen also looks after HIVE which is the Hull Immersive Visualization Environment. Helen had done a great job of getting everyone to attend the event with the result that we had a full house.

Our invited NGS user presenters were Clive Davenhall from NeSC who talked about the nano-CMOS project and Srikanth Nagella from STFC RAL who spoke about the RAL visualisation cluster that is now part of the NGS. As well as our NGS users, there were also presentations from our technical director Dr David Wallom and Dr David Fergusson who co-ordinates training activities for the NGS. All the presentations were very well received and a lot of positive feedback was received.

We had also taken along our Roaming RA service in the form of Shiv Kaushal who is based at the University of Leeds. Not all institutions currently have a RA Operator who can distrbute grid certificates so we tend to take along a Roaming RA operater with us when we visit one of these places. Shiv was slightly overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted grid certificates at the end of the event and he spent lunchtime dealing with quite a long queue!

All in all it was a very successful event and we're now looking forward to the next one which will take place at Canterbury Christ Church University. This event will incorporate some hands on training and is open to everyone from any institute. If you would like to attend this event then please register!

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.

Hitting the road

Things have been pretty hectic in the outreach and training department over the last week or so and it's going to get worse!

We've got quite a few roadshow events coming up at either end of the country. Next week we're off to the University of Hull to run an event which is now almost fully booked. This will be held in Hull's visualisation suite so it made sense to have a presentation about the visualisation resources available from the NGS at this event. If you would like to see the agenda for this event then please visit the event page for the Hull roadshow.

After that we are off to Canterbury Christ Church university at the end of the month to run a roadshow event incorporating a training session as well. This event is open to anyone but places on the training session are already very limited so register quick if you would like to attend! Christ Church university is slightly different from the universities that we usually visit as they have a very strong focus on the arts, humanities and social sciences. The NGS user presentations at this event hopefully reflect this. If you would like to attend this event then visit the event page for the Canterbury Christ Church University roadshow.

The day after we are then off to the University of Surrey to again take part in a roadshow with a difference as this event will have a distinct "cloud" focus. The roadshow will take place in conjunction with Dr Lee Gillam who is undertaking a JISC funded study on "Using cloud computing for research". More information about this event can be found at the event page for the University of Surrey roadshow.

Can you hear us?

Last Friday many of the NGS staff were up at NeSC in Edinburgh to discuss communications and the new NGS website. It reminded me that I haven't posted on here for a while about the various outreach methods we have here at the NGS so here is a small reminder!

NGS blog - obviously! This is syndicated to the front page of the new NGS website - you can see the tab in the text box in top right. It's also syndicated to the GridPP and iSGTW websites.

NGS website - which has recently been revamped. We don't see the website as a static entity and we are constantly responding to feedback and making the site even better for you to use. If you have any feedback about the new website then please let us know through the helpdesk.

NGS email lists - we have 2 of these. We have the news list through which all subscribers receive a fortnightly email bulletin full of news from the NGS and occasionally further afield. It also contains details of upcoming conferences and training events. We have over 720 subscribers to this service. All active NGS users are strongly advised to sign up to our status list which sends out notices about service levels, problems and downtime.

NGS newsletter - we produce a quarterly newsletter which features longer and more indepth articles about the NGS as well as features on new technology coming soon. It's also an opportunity to introduce users to NGS staff and NGS sites. The newsletter is distributed in hard copy at NGS events such as roadshows and conferences and is also available as a pdf from our website.

We also have a NGS Facebook group where the occasional photo of the NGS team in action pops up and also our Twitter account. If you have any more ideas on how the NGS can reach out to it's users then we would love to hear them.

And the wind down begins

Things are beginning to quieten down here at the NGS in preparation for the Christmas holidays. As you may expect NGS staff are also on holiday over the next few weeks so we have announced our Christmas cover arrangements in the fortnightly NGS email bulletin that went out today. This announcement is also on the front page of our website.

However, although things may be calming down now, next year is already looking very busy. Personally I'm going to be going through all the feedback we've received on our new website and addressing the comments, suggestions and feedback. We want to make the website as useful for our users and institutions as we possibly can so all feedback is welcome!

If you haven't already done so there is still time to complete our user survey which will close on the 20th of January 2010. So if you would like to be in with a chance to win one of three Amazon vouchers to help with your January sales shopping then make sure you complete the survey soon! I'll be spending the end of January going through the user survey results so if you would like your comments and feedback heard then you know what to do!

I'm also busy organising 4 NGS roadshows for the beginning of next year at various sites across the country. Keep an eye out on here and the NGS website for more news on these. The roadshows are becoming more and more popular and sometimes it's hard keeping up with demand. However we will consider all requests to hold more roadshows after Easter! If you would like a NGS roadshow at your institution then please let us know by emailing the support desk.

I hope you all have a great holiday and that we'll see you back on the NGS in 2010.

Flying visit to QUB

This week saw several members of the NGS team fly over to Belfast to host a NGS roadshow at Queen's University Belfast.

The cold weather was quickly forgotten due to the warmth of the welcome by the local organiser Ricky Rankin who gave us a quick tour of the new library at QUB. I have to say that it is very impressive - much better than the cold dark libraries I had to frequent as a student!

We had nearly 30 attendees from both QUB and the University of Ulster which was great. We always invite NGS users to speak about their research at these events and this time we had Julie Bardin from the University of Strathclyde and Che Seabourne from the University of Leeds. Both gave excellent presentations about their research and also sang the presentations of the NGS and particularly the support and help they had received from our helpdesk. No I hadn't bribed them depsite several people asking!

Lunch was a lively event with many conversations about how the NGS could help research from ecology to cancer research and people asking how to get their grid certificates etc. Hopefully the intial interest will be followed up by new users from Northern Ireland!

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!

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.

Normal service will be resumed

It's been a bit quiet here on the NGS blog recently as I've been on holiday for the last 3 weeks and I seem to be the only person who ever has something to say! Just as well really for an outreach person... Well now that I'm back normal service will hopefully be resumed.

However things are a tad hectic here in the life of the NGS - well for me at least. We have 2 of our very popular NGS roadshows happening this month - one at the University of Exeter and one at the University of Glasgow. We've got some more lined up for later on this year but we aren't taking any more bookings for 2009 as we're so busy! If you're interested in having a NGS roadshow at your institution or you want to find out more about them then drop me a line on here and I'll get back to you ASAP.

The next event coming up (apart from roadshows) is the EGEE'09 conference in Barcelona from the 21st - 25th of September. The NGS will have several members of staff there and will be a partner on the UKI exhibition stand at the event along with OMII-UK, Grid Ireland, NeSC and GridPP. If you're there, stop by and say hi!

Roadshow talks available online

If you are considering hosting a NGS roadshow at your institution or are simply curious about what goes on at these events, then have a look at the NGS website where the presentations from our latest roadshows (Aston and Bath) are now online.

The Aston roadshow was a 2 day event with a "normal" NGS roadshow held on the first day for a few hours before lunch with a full day of "hands on" training on the second day organised by the NeSC training, outreach and education team. Presentations from Aston are available here.

The Bath roadshow was a more traditional event with a series of presentations followed by lunch. Presentations from Bath are available here.

Both events were full organised by the NGS and NeSC leaving local organisers with the single responsibility of booking a suitable room - oh and some help with local advertising never goes amiss! If you would like to publicise NGS resources in your institution with very little effort required then please contact myself (gillian.sinclair@manchester.ac.uk) for further information.

Planning ahead

As I type, several NGS staff are currently hosting a NGS roadshow at the University of Bath. This roadshow was particularly popular with approximately 40 people registered with the majority being from Bath. This roadshow is just an "over lunch" event unlike the event last week at Aston which also combined a training event on the second day. Remember if you are interested in having the NGS come to your institution to give a roadshow then please contact me (gillian.sinclair(at)manchester(dot)ac.uk) for further details.

Many of you may have recently recieved an email from the NGS asking you to confirm your requirement for NGS resources. This is basically a piece of housekeeping from the NGS to ensure that our records are up to date and to help us understand the current size of the NGS user base and yearly load on the NGS. Please follow the instructions contained in the email but if you do have any questions about your account then please contact the NGS helpdesk (support(at)grid-support.ac.uk).

Planning is underway for the upcoming conference seasons in June and September so if you know of any conferences which would be relevant for the NGS to attend and have an exhibition area (or opportunity for us to present) then please let me know at the email above.

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).

Are you in the South West?

The NGS is holding a NGS roadshow event at the University of Bath on the 15th of April and this event is now open to everyone from any institution.

So if you are a PhD student looking for a way to speed up your research, a group leader with a research team looking for extra compute and data resources or someone who wants to know what on earth this "grid" thing is all about then come along!

The event lasts for a few hours including lunch and features presentations introducing the NGS and the services it provides including training. We are also pleased to say that 2 NGS users are also presenting at the event -

• Andrew Turner from the University of Leeds will be speaking about the use of NGS resources for geodemographic modelling.

• Narcis Fernandez-Fuentes also from the University of Leeds will present his work on in-silico drug screening on the NGS.

The event is free to attend but registration is required on the NGS website. Registration closes on Monday 6th May.

What do people want from ICT? – Part 2

The second presentation at this JISC conference session was given by Prof. Rob Procter, Research Director of National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS).

Rob was talking about the e-Uptake project which looked at barriers and enablers to the uptake of e-infrastructure. Again interviews with 50 people from a wide variety of research areas were conducted as well as intermediary services such as ITS units at universities and national services. This resulted in over 25 hours of audio tape to be transcribed which must have been a daunting task!

The second phase of the project was of particular interest as this involved 25 “established and inspirational” HEI’s as well as small specialised research institutes. Two interviews were performed at each – one at a strategic level and the other at the direct user support level.
This was of particular interest to me as often we deal directly with the end user but it is important to have the support of everyone in the institution from the strategic level down to the “coal face”. This is particularly important to the NGS as we try to encourage more HEI’s to become members of the NGS. If people at a strategic level are not aware of the services and benefits on offer then it makes our job much harder.

The results from these interviews will eventually be available as the researchers are currently developing an online database of their findings. However some of the initial findings were presented. I’ve listed them here along with some comments on what the NGS is currently doing to tackle these problems.

1. People weight up the cost of adoption – is it worthwhile learning to use e-research?
Through user case studies and user participation in our roadshow and innovation forum agendas, we showcase how using NGS resources has helped real-life research take place. There is no better advertisement than our major users! We also showcase users research in many of our outreach mechanisms such as user case studies, the NGS newsletter, website etc. All examples to potential new users of how the NGS can help research.

2. What’s the long term sustainability?
The NGS has just received funding for another 2 years (until March 2011) and discussions are already taking place for long term security after this date.

3. Enablers are needed such as roadshows, consultancy, collaboration and the need to follow up potential leads
The NGS hosts roadshows at any interested institution and these events are organised by NGS staff ensuring as little burden as possible on local organisers. The events are free to host and attend. All you need to do is let us know that you’d like one!
The NGS has a helpdesk staffed by experienced grid users who are there to offer help in the immediate term but also longer term advice to institutions and users.

4. Lack of support infrastructure
The NGS has a helpdesk as mentioned above and also offers a great deal of support to new institutions wishing to join the NGS by providing them with a “buddy”. We also offer a wide variety of training which is free through the training team at NeSC so new users can get up and running as quickly as possible on the NGS and also training for more experienced users in order to hone their skills.

5. Awareness raising
Well this is what I do as the NGS Liaison Officer. It’s my full time job to make sure that the NGS reaches out to as many people as possible through every means available! We have a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools such as this blog, Twitter, Facebook etc. We attend a large number of research-based conferences in order to reach out directly to users as well as conferences held by organisations such as JISC. We go out to institutions with our roadshow events in order to reach a wide variety of people at an institution from PhD students to IT directors. We produce a large range of literature from user case studies to newsletters demonstrating how the NGS helps researchers and how NGS resources are used. And much much more!

Of course there is always more the NGS could be doing but with the resources that we have I’d like to think that we are tackling many of the issues that Rob raised and that our users do feel supported and informed. We are always looking for suggestions from users for things that they feel we could do more of or things they feel that are missing from the NGS. All comments are welcome!