A smattering of updates

Over conference season there was what can only be described as a smattering of small announcements that you may have missed during your travels.  The blog seems like an ideal place to gather these together!

NGS News
The latest edition of our quarterly newsletter was released in time for conference season.  Available to download from our website, September’s edition contains articles on -

• A round up of news from Europe including the release of the first Unified Middleware Distribution
• An introduction to the new Certificate Wizard
• Championing e-Research and e-infrastructure - the Campus and Community Champions
• NGS user case study - Using the NGS to model the climate impact of aircraft emissions
• ...and more!

Tell us what you think!
Also on the website we have a new poll on the home page.  This time we are asking people how easy it is to find the information they are looking for on the NGS website.  So no matter if you are a frequent or occasional visitor to the NGS website, let us know by voting in our poll.  It can be found on the right hand side of the homepage.

 
Busy users
There is a new NGS user case study on the website.  Maria Holstensson from the Institute of Cancer Research explains how she is using the NGS to optimise cancer treatment for children suffering neuroblastoma.

Children with neuroblastoma who are being treated with targeted radionuclide therapy can have their treatment monitored with gamma camera images. These images are used to calculate the amount of drug taken up by the tumour and to estimate the radiation dose. However the image quality can be poor due to scattering and interference. Maria Holstensson from the Institute of Cancer Research is looking at tackling these problems.

Maria said "We have had absolutely fantastic help from the NGS and as a result of using the Grid we have been able to run multiple parallel simulations that we would not have been able to run otherwise".

 
How many?!
We’re pleased to announce that we now have over 1000 subscribers our fortnightly NGS news bulletin.  We have subscribers from all over the UK and much further afield with 21 countries represented amongst our subscribers. 
The news bulletin is delivered to your inbox every second Friday (with some exceptions during conference and holiday season!) and contains news from the NGS, updates from our member sites, details of forthcoming relevant conferences, calls for papers for relevant journals and much more.  You can subscribe to the mailing list from the JISCmail site.

What do you do on the NGS?

It's been a busy month or so even though it's the holidays as this is the ideal time for me to contact many of the NGS users who promised to write user case studies for me regarding their research.

We have a wide range of reseachers who use the NGS as part of their every day research and it's important for the NGS to highlight that our resources aren't just used by the "typical suspects" such as physicists.

Over the last few weeks I've added another 2 user case studies to the NGS website -

• Modelling the effect of the peptide sequence on the binding affinity to carbon nanotubes from Susana De Tomasio, University of Warwick
• Systematic modeling of ionic liquids from Edward Ballard, University of Wales Bangor

Both these case studies demonstrate how the use of NGS resources is helping to speed up research enabling results to be produced and published faster than previously.

Edwards supervisor, Dr Anna Croft praised the NGS, "The NGS has been an excellent resource for many of our research projects. In particular, I have been able to use it with undergraduate researchers and give them a taste of what it is like to work on large computing infrastructures - an experience that has helped some of them secure PhD funding, both here and overseas, to continue in the computational area. When we had teething problems, the support staff were always friendly, helpful and got things working. Because of this support and the flexibility in requesting computing time, the NGS is one of our first ports of call for projects requiring a larger computing resource."

Thank you Anna!

Beep, beep - NGS coming through...

There is a new NGS user case study up on the website and this time it deals with traffic. I'm sure this is a popular topic particularly at 9am on a Monday morning!

NGS user Aengus McCulloch from Newcastle University has been using NGS resources to tackle the explosion in the volume of data relating to real world events such as systems monitoring weather and road traffic etc. Processing the large volumes of data generated by geographical sensors in a short time period is an enormous computational challenge. Guess where the NGS can help out?

Aengus used the real world problem of traffic monitoring and routing as a test case for classifying near real-time processing operations on geographically referenced data using Grid computing architectures. By using the NGS he managed to successfully test his system with up to 250 vehicles.

Aengus said "The NGS has made endless CPU hours available to me through a standards based interface; it has been an invaluable resource for my research".

To read more about his research, see the scalable road traffic case study.

I’ve recently added a new poll to the NGS website home page which asks if our users collaborate internationally and, if so, if this involves the NGS.

The latest question is the 7th poll to appear on the NGS website so I thought that in this blog post I would recap some of the results of previous posts.

The polls have covered a wide range of topics from “do you like our new website?” way back in November 2009 when we launched the new site, to questions regarding funding and access to resources.

Back in March last year we asked people which operating system they used to access the NGS. This has an important bearing on how our tools and applications are developed in the future as we need to ensure that they are usable by NGS users regardless of their operating system. We had 175 responses and the results were -

• Windows – 35%
• Linux – 43%
• Mac – 19%
• Other – 3%

The results were pretty much as expected with Linux users being in the majority. However it was interesting to see that Windows users are catching up and Mac users growing in numbers.

Also many moons ago we asked if our users would like us to offer an academic cloud service. This was a popular poll with 137 replies and the following results –

• Yes -66%
• No - 20%
• Don’t know – 14%

We are pleased to say that the NGS cloud prototype has been very popular and is currently running at capacity as we help and assist NGS users to make the most of this new prototype service.

Of course it’s not just specialised services that we offer, we also offer the day to day stuff that enables people to get started using the NGS. We wanted to see how the users thought we were doing in terms of authorising new applications to use NGS resources. Were we taking too long? Were we meeting expectations? We were pleased to see that nearly half (46%) of applications were approved the same day with 28% approved in the next 1 – 3 days.

We are always looking for new polls for the NGS website so if you have any suggestions then we would love to hear them. You can ask anything about software, hardware, services, usage, user stats etc. All the polls are anonymous.

The sun is out

Given the very sunny Bank holiday weekend we've just had here in the UK, it seems apt to highlight the latest user case study to appear on the NGS website.

The latest case study highlights the research of Marco Califano at the University of Leeds who has been looking into exploiting solar power using the NGS. Marco used NGS resources to try to identify the best materials, sizes and shapes of nanocrystals that could lead to high-efficiency energy conversion in the next-generation solar cells.

Marco explained how "the outcome of my research could help the UK develop alternative, renewable energy technologies that enhance the cleanliness and efficiency of energy production. This, in turn, will contribute to the Government's commitment to meet the greenhouse gas emission targets set in Kyoto".

To read more about his research, see the exploiting solar power case study.

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!

Innovative NGS

The more observant amongst you may have noticed a recent addition to the top level tabs on the NGS website.

As well as making sure that the NGS runs all the services required by our users and sites on a day to day basis, we are also working on services for the future. To keep you up to date with our work "behind the scenes", we have added a new Innovation section to the website.

This section currently includes information on our prototype cloud service and user interfaces such as as GSI-PuTTY and R through the NGS (Windows). Some of these services are looking for people to help develop the applications or to be the first users and to help develop them for the wider community.

We hope that you find this section interesting and useful!

New on the website!

I've been updating the NGS website today with a couple of new things. Well I've actually updated it several times this week - there seems to be a lot going on! I thought I would point the new additions out on here just incase you miss them as there is so much being added at the moment.

We've got a new poll up on the website asking if you would like the NGS to provide an academic cloud service. Now we've all heard a lot about clouds over the last few months as it seems to be the buzzword of the moment but do you really want one? Yes, no , not sure? All answers are welcome and it will take less than 5 secs to record your opinion. See the home page of the NGS website to vote!

I also finished off the 11th edition (yes really...) of the NGS quarterly newsletter this week and it's now up on the website. There is a wide range of articles in the newsletter covering topics such as the EGI and the role the NGS is playing in this, how the NGS is demonstrating global interoperability, a user case study showing how researchers actually use our resources, an introduction to our University of Sheffield member site and much more. It never fails to surprise me just how much is going on at the NGS and how much we have to report back to our users through our newsletter each quarter.

I'm already planning the next edition of the newsletter which will be out in time for AHM so if you have any ideas for articles then please let me know!

How do you do it? We want to know!

Incase you haven't noticed there's a new poll on the home page of the NGS website (you'll have to scroll down a wee bit) which is proving to be rather popular. We want to know which operating system people use to access the NGS. So if you are a Mac, Windows or Linux user then let us know! Feedback of this kind is invaluable as we can then ensure that our documentation and tools are up to date and relevant for our users. The results so far are somewhat surprising!

New on the NGS website

There have been some new additions to the NGS website over the last week or so - mainly news stories but hopefully of interest to you all!

Karl Bateman, a NGS user from the University of Manchester, had his research featured as the headline article on iSGTW recently. Karl is researching into how dinosaurs moved, in particular the dinosaur Acrocanthosaurus atokensis which is essentially the same size as a T-Rex. The full article entitled "Answering a truly big question: how did dinosaurs move?" is available on the iSGTW website.

Another article currently featured on the NGS home page refers to the Certificate wizard which has been recently developed by Jens Jensen at the NGS. Basically the article explains how we are making it easier for you to look after your grid certificate!

We also have a new poll on the NGS home page. We'd like to find out who funds the people that visit our website. So if you have a spare second please tick the appropriate box on the front page! You'll find the poll on the home page just below the NGS load monitor. This will give us an indication of who our visitors are funded by.

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.

New NGS website launched today!

After several months of hardwork by a large number of NGS staff, we are pleased to announce tha the new NGS website was launched today.

We hope that the new design and layout will make it easier for visitors to find the information they need quickly and easily. We also hope that it will enable you to find out more about the services that the NGS offers.

The home page is designed to be dynamic and will be regularly updated with news from the NGS as well as having feeds from this blog, the NGS-STATUS list and the most recent updates to the website.

Feedback on the new website is welcome through the NGS helpdesk.