What does the NGS do for Europe?

Quite a lot actually is the answer!

The NGS will be hosting a second seminar series this summer and the theme of the 3 seminar event focuses on the services that we provide for the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI).  As with last time, the seminar series will be held using EVO allowing people from all over the world to participate in the seminar and to quiz the presenters.  The details for this series are -


20th June - Grid Accounting and APEL
This talk will give an overview of how accounting is done on the grid, and what it is used for.  It will cover the NGS accounting system at a high level.  It will then go into more detail about the implementation of APEL, the accounting system for EGI, including the particular challenges involved and the plans for development.

27th June - GOCDB, the NGS and EGI 
This talk will cover a brief overview of the functionality provided by GOCDB, the official repository for storing and presenting EGI topology and resources information. The seminar will explain how it is used within the NGS, recent developments, useful features on the future roadmap and a chance to ask questions about the system. There will also be a short overview of how GOCDB is used in the context of the EGI project.

4th July -  The Training Marketplace
The Training Marketplace is a one-stop shop for training developed by STFC and the EGI InSPIRE project. Here you will find information about classroom-based training courses and online training materials including a repository containing thousands of resources. You can also search for PhD or MSc courses, or for resources for trainers such as a Training CA. The Training Marketplace equally allows you to advertise and a freely available gadget enables you to customise and embed the Training marketplace in your own website. This seminar will talk you through the Training Marketplace and demonstrate how you can embed a customised version of a training calendar, map or repository in your own website.

If you are interested in attending any of these online seminars then please see the webpage for further details and how to join in online.  There are also Facebook event pages available for each seminar series to help you inform interested colleagues and to invite them along.

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!

E-infrastructure summer school - registration open now!

A brief hiatus here on the NGS blog as several of us are / have been on holiday. Back to normal service now hopefully!

A lot of my time since I returned from holiday has been devoted not to the NGS but to another project I am currently working on. Catchily named SeIUCCR (pronounced "sucker"), the project was funded by the EPSRC "Crossing the Chasm" call which called for networks and "advocates" to promote the wider uptake of UK e-infrastructures by researchers in engineering and the physical sciences.

Part of the SeIUCCR project is an e-infrastructure summer school which is due to take place in Abdingdon near Oxford in September. The residential summer school will offer an introduction to e-infrastructure including Clouds and Grids to UK PhD students and postdocs over 4 days. The summer school is fully funded including travel expenses and applications are open now.

If you (or anyone you know) would like to apply then be quick as applications will close at 9am on Monday 15th of August. Details of the summer school can be found on the SeIUCCR website and a detailed agenda is available from the registration site.

Teacher's pet

As well as serving the needs of the UK academic research community, the NGS is also involved in helping to train the upcoming generation of new researchers.

NGS resources are used in a number of university courses including those at Cranfield University and the University of Edinburgh. In a new article on the NGS website, David Fergusson who leads training at the NGS, explains how he has used NGS resources in his teaching of the MSc in Distributed Scientific Computing for the last 6 years.

If you would like further information on how grid and cloud computing can be incorporated into your teaching, then contact the NGS helpdesk.

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.

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!

Application hosting environment and UI/WMS - preparations continue!

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

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

Loud and clear (and preferably red)

Yesterday saw a large number of the NGS staff from all over the country and NGS users meet up at STFC RAL for a days workshop on Communicating Science. This was the first non-grid training event organised by the NGS and it was great to see so many people there.

The event was presented by Myc Riggulsford who has had many jobs including a BBC radio presenter and press officer. He was a very entertaining and affable speaker who certainly held our attention for the day with interesting anecdotes and tales from his past employment.

Many topics were covered including presentation techniques, how to write for the press, the use of images and how to present yourself. Highlights were definitely the "press conference" where Myc played the role of a scientist involved in the first pig - human organ transplant. After the press conference, the audience was divided up into groups and each group had to write a story for the newspaper of their choice. Needless to say there were several very interesting "Frankenstein" type tabloid stories!

A special mention must go to David Wallom (NGS technical director) and John Kewley (NGS helpdesk manager) for being brave enough to stand up and give a presentation to be critiqued. John did especially well as the slides were not his and he had only seen them about 30 mins before the presentation!

At the end of the day, the wrap up session involved putting together a list of the top tips from that day according to the participants. This list is available on the event website on the NGS website.

We have already recieved some excellent feedback on the event and would be delighted to receive more from anyone who attended!

Are you a Matlab user?

Then if so this may be of interest to you!

If you currently use MatLab but would like to run it on clusters and grids then the Oerc at the University of Oxford is holding a free 3 day workshop in May that will include “hands on” sessions.

For more information please see the event website.

Crime and the grid (and a slight return)

If I thought my journey to Sweden for the last ever EGEE user forum was stressful, little did I know about the return one! Thanks to a volcano it took me 3 days, 7 trains, 41 hours, 6 countries and 2 overnight stays to get home. Not doing that again in a hurry...

So updates from the NGS - not a great deal mainly because I've been away! However we do have a new user case study up on the website . Nick Malleson from the University of Leeds has been using NGS resources to model criminal patterns in Leeds. A really interesting and different use of NGS resources!

A quick reminder as well incase you haven't seen the announcements but the registration for our Communicating Science event will close on Wednesday afternoon so register soon if you want to attend!

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!

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!

Bioinformatics training from the NGS

In conjunction with the Scottish Bioinformatics Forum, the NGS is running a one day training event at NeSC in Edinburgh in March and the event is open to all.

The course will cover accessing the facilities of the NGS to run high through put applications across multiple nodes for bioinformatics. Attendees will launch jobs using command line and GUI interfaces and use some of the pre-installed bioinformatics applications available from the NGS nodes. Also included will be a short introduction to the practicalities of translating bioinformatics formats between XML formats.

If you would like to attend this event then please see the event page on the NeSC website. Remember you don't have to be a SBF member to attend or indeed Scottish!

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!

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.

Call for Winter School particpants

Nothing to do with skiing or snowboarding I'm afraid but instead this is an online grid school!

The International Winter School in Grid Computing 2010 (IWSGC'10) will be held from the 1st of March until the 2nd of April 2010 and is now calling for participants.

IWSGC’10 will bring together world experts and enthusiastic students. It will be delivered fully online: participants will be able to attend the School without losing time and money on travelling. It will examine the conceptual and practical underpinnings of today's grids. Experts will provide exciting practical exercises, discuss the challenges of building and sustaining e-Infrastructure, report its rapid influence on the way we research, design and make decisions. They will share their vision of the developments and challenges ahead.

The deadline for applications closes on the 31st of January 2010. Please see the event website for more information.

Do you need a certificate?

The NGS will shortly be running another RA Operator training course at STFC RAL. Participation in the course will allow participants to be able to distribute and manage certificates at their institution so if you don't currently have someone at your institution who can fulfill this role, then this is the ideal opportunity to nominate a RA!

The training course is free to attend, lasts a few hours and we even give you lunch!

Full details about the course and how to register are available on the NGS website.

Get in training

The NGS will be running another RA operators training event on the 11th of November. If you or someone at your institution needs to be able to distribute, authenticate, revoke UK e-science certificates etc then this is the course you have to do!

It's a short course starting at 11am at RAL down near Oxford and will finish by 2pm. Lunch is included as well and the event is free to attend.

Further information (inlcuding how to register for the event) is available on the RA training pages on the NGS website.