Issue 40, April 2006 News Contents ICEAGE Project Starts International Summer School on Grid Computing: APPLY NOW! The Open Science Grid Grid and Chips! First Public lecture in Series Announced Call for papers: AHM2006 NeSC News www.nesc.ac.uk ICEAGE Project Starts The ICEAGE (International Collaboration to Extend and Advance Grid Education) project Kicked off with a Meeting at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh on the 23rd and 24th March. The Project Office will be based at NeSC. The Project sets out to stimulate and support advances in grid education throughout Europe. ICEAGE will create a roadmap and insights into the future of education in an era of pervasive e-Infrastructure. Grid Education in rapidly advancing scientific domains is particularly labour intensive. It must draw on the expertise of a small community of pioneers. A major objective of ICEAGE is to provide an effective mechanism for distilling their knowledge and rapidly propagating it across Europe. ICEAGE will create a forum to bring together experts worldwide to expand and advance Grid Education. Building on EGEE, ICEAGE will demonstrate the wide potential of Grids, revealing new creative and business opportunities which will lead to the inclusion of social, ethical and economic issues in educational programmes. ICEAGE will show clearly how education can benefit from e-Infrastucture. Call for pspers: Digital libraries and e-Science The main aim of the ICEAGE Project is to stimulate and support advances in grid education throughout Europe by meeting the following objectives: eProtein Scientific Meeting & Workshop • • Euro-Southeast Asia 2006 ICT Forum • e-Science Institute call for Workshops and Meeting proposals and theme topics EGEE II project Started Current Vacancies For more information on anything mentioned in the newsletter, please contact: Alison McCall alison@nesc.ac.uk Telephone 0131 651 4783 Newsletter produced by: Alison McCall and Jennifer Hurst Next months deadline for articles is: 24th April 2006 • • Achieving rapid growth in effective advanced grid education Broadening engagement in an advanced grid education both geographically and across disciplines and make best use of worldwide capacity for advanced grid education ICEAGE will enable students and educators to obtain and develop Grid Education via sustained, large-scale, multi-purpose e-Infrastructure. Deliver a stimulating programme of Educational Events, including International Summer Schools It aims for European Universities to adopt courses in many disciplines to support the deployment and exploitation of e-Infrastructure. ICEAGE will ensure that citizens are well prepared to use e-Infrastructure in their private and professional lives. It will stimulate European educators by closely coupling the ICEAGE forum with a pioneering educational system, based on e-Infrastructure, involving a dynamic programme of events, shared strategies, information and material. Focused on the advancement of Grid Education in Europe, ICEAGE is aiming to work with a number of users from European research and academic groups in several scientific and application disciplines. Project Partners International Collaborative Partners currently are: • The National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, UK • Universita’ degli Studi di Catania, Italy • SPACI (Southern Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructures), Italy • CERN, Geneva • Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Stockholm • SZTAKI (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Számítástechnikai és Automatizálási Kutató Intézet), Budapest In addition ICEAGE has created a Forum to bring together experts worldwide to expand and advance Grid Education, 51 Founder Members from 21 Countries originally agreed to be Members of the Forum. Fore more information look at the project webpage: http://www.iceage-eu.org/ Issue 40, April 2006 APPLY NOW! for International Summer School on Grid Computing Grid and Chips! The next International Summer School in Grid Computing will take place from the 9th to the 21st of July 2006. The school will be held in Italy, in the Jolly Hotel Delle Terme, on the beautiful Island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples. Students from all over the world are invited to apply for the well established school, now in its fourth year. The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in collaboration with leading design houses, chip manufacturers and ECAD vendors is funding a £5.3M ($9.1M) project which will apply Grid technologies and know-how to tackle some of the fundamental challenges of nano-CMOS design. Many speakers have now been confirmed The school will enjoy presentations from: Professor Dr Ian Foster presenting a Vision of Grid Middleware. Dr Brooklin Gore (Industrial Grid applications), Professor Dr Satoshi Matsuoka (NAREGI grids), Prof Dr Miron Livny (Principles and Architectures of High Throughput Computing), Dr Vincent Breton (HealthGrids), and Gaetano Maron (GridCC: Real-time instrumentations grids), Professor Dr. Malcolm Atkinson, UK e-Science Envoy (principles, architectures and data), Dr. Erwin Laure (EGEE production grids). Progressive scaling of CMOS transistors, as tracked by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) and captured in Moore’s law, has driven the phenomenal success of the semiconductor industry, delivering larger, faster, cheaper circuits. Silicon technology has now entered the nano-CMOS era with 40 nm MOSFETs in mass production now and sub-10 nm transistors scheduled for production in 2018. However the years of ‘happy scaling’ are over and the fundamental challenges that the semiconductor industry faces, at both technology and device level, will impinge deeply upon the design of future integrated circuits and systems. It is the case for example that trapping of a single electron in the channel region of a device can alter its drive current by more than 15%! Atomic level considerations of devices and design libraries are essential and need to be coupled with the overall design of circuits and systems. Many of the speakers will also be available to discuss concepts further with students out of lectures and give the students the benefit of their vast experience in this area. The extensive and challenging Provisional Curriculum for the School is now available to view online on the website http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/ISSGC06/ and includes presentations on topics such as Distributed system principles, Foundations of distributed computing Architecture and integration of Grid middleware Advancing computational models, security and data management for Grids as well as practical demonstrations. The students also take part in a fullday integrated practical. Lead by the University of Glasgow, the project aims to revolutionise the electronics design industry through Grid technologies. Principal Investigator Professor Asenov from Glasgow University states “This project brings together leading semiconductor device, circuit and system experts from academia and industry and e-scientists with strong Grid expertise. Only by working in close collaboration, and adequately connected and resourced by e-science and Grid technology, can we understand and tackle the design complexity of nano-CMOS electronics, securing a competitive advantage for the UK electronics industry”. Applications are invited from enthusiastic and ambitious researchers who have recently started (or are about to start) working on Grid projects. Students may come from any country.They may be planning to pioneer or enable new forms of e-Infrastructure, to engage in fundamental distributed systems research or to develop new methods in any discipline that depends on the emerging capabilities of e-Infrastructure. Professor Sinnott from the National e-Science Centre at the University of Glasgow who will lead the e-Science development activity states “Through close collaboration with OMII-UK we expect to revolutionise the way in which the disparate teams involved in electronics design process work. Our Grid efforts will be on four key areas: workflows, security, data management and resource management, each targeted to the real needs of the scientists we are to support”. In all previous years the school has been oversubscribed. Selection for the 2006 School is therefore competitive. We expect to accept between 60 and 70 students.Applications are accepted to the school until the 1 May 200 6. The total number of applications is updated continually on the summer school website. In all previous years the School has been oversubscribed. Selection for the 2006 School is therefore competitive. At the time of writing there are over 70 applications. The university partners in this project include the Device Modelling and the Microsystems Technology groups (University of Glasgow), the Advanced Processor Technologies group (University of Manchester), the Electronic Systems Design Group (University of Southampton), the Intelligent Systems group (University of York), the MixedMode Design Group (University of Edinburgh). We will be looking for students with commitment and enthusiasm for Grid research and development and expect competence and experience in some aspects of software development, distributed systems, computational systems, data systems and Grid applications. Students will establish their credentials from academic qualifications and experience. We welcome educators who are planning to teach Grid computing. Participants are expected to be comfortable using spoken English. The e-Science and Grid technology will be provided by the National e-Science Centre (at the universities of Glasgow/ Edinburgh) and the e-Science North West (Manchester University). Two of the largest UK chip design companies ARM and Wolfson Electronics; the world leader in design software Synopsys, and the leading semiconductor chip manufacturers Freescale, National Semiconductors and Fujtsu are the industrial partners. Website: http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/ISSGC06/ The final deadline for applications is *1 May 2006* Preferred date of application 21 April 2006. NeSC News Participation is free of charge but subject to registration on-line 2 www.nesc.ac.uk Issue 40, April 2006 Call For Papers: Fifth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting Reminder – Paper Deadline 1st May First Public Lecture in Series Announced The e-Science Institute is delighted to announce the first in a series of public lectures associated with its thematic programme. The Fifth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2006) will be held from 18-21st September 2006 at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham, UK.There are several options for participation (please note that to reflect the increasing quality of the submissions, this year we are asking for full papers to be submitted for review, rather than abstracts. Professor Jessie Kennedy, Leader of the Database and Object Systems Group at Napier University and who is leading the theme ‘Exploiting Diverse Sources of Scientific Data’ will give a talk titled: Integrating Diverse Sources of Scientific Data: Is it safe to match on name? A full review process will be managed by the AHM Programme Committee. Details of the format required for the papers, and how to submit is available at http://www.allhands.org.uk/ This talk will be of interest to anyone working with diverse and distributed datasets and in particular to biologists, as Prof Kennedy will be using the SEEK (http://seek.ecoinformatics. org/) research project as a case study. Call for Papers for All Hands Meeting 2006 Mini-Workshops Mini-Workshops for the All Hands Meeting have now been selected. You can find details of all nine Mini-Workshops at: http://www.allhands.org.uk/programme/workshops/index.html Time & Date: 25 April 2006 at 16:00 with tea & coffee on arrival Some Mini-Workshops are also calling for papers to be submitted. Location: The University of Edinburgh, Sanderson Building (lecture theatre 1), Kings Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JF eSI also intends to web cast this talk. For further details of the talk, theme, web cast details when they become available please go to: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/681/ More information can be found at www.allhands.org.uk and information about submitting papers can be found at: http://www.allhands.org.uk/submissions/index.html Abstract of talk: The wealth and diversity of scientific data collected and stored is growing rapidly as automation increases and technological costs diminish.Today’s researchers have to make best use of this wealth of data resources in combination with the data their own research provides. There is huge potential for scientific discovery by combining information from these multiple, diverse and distributed data resources. But their sheer number, complexity and diversity makes this a daunting task, with many research challenges. This talk will look at one of the problems facing researchers; that of data integration and in particular the issue of matching data sets using names. The Open Science Grid The first OSG Executive Director and Council Chair were elected in February 2006, who will lead the operation and expansion of the Open Science Grid. The OSG is a nationwide community grid built by research groups from United States universities and national laboratories that enables collaborative research through distributed computing technologies. The Open Science Grid is a distributed computing facility that enables innovative collaboration and research. The OSG Consortium’s unique alliance of science researchers, software developers and computing centers brings petascale computing and storage resources into a uniform shared cyberinfrastructure for scientific collaborations. The OSG is supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more information visit www.opensciencegrid.org http://www.opensciencegrid.org/ . This is a particular problem facing biologists, but also applies to other scientists such as astronomers. The Scientific Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) research project which aims to develop an environment to support ecologists undertake ecological data analysis will be used as a case study to explore the issues. Using a typical ecological analysis scenario we will explore the problems of integrating data sets and focus in on the specific problem of matching data sets using scientific names for organisms. We will then describe the approach being taken by SEEK and the wider community to address these issues. “The OSG opens up exciting opportunities for students to apply powerful computing resources to new problems in science, engineering, and commerce,” added Mike Wilde, the OSG’s new Education Coordinator. “With OSG access, and training in its use, we envision that more college and high school students, and even visitors at science museums, can experiment with the power of grid computing.” OMII Southampton is recruiting a number of positions as result of its involvement in OMII-UK and other projects. * Project Manager: http://www.jobs.soton.ac.uk/adminweb/jsp/jobs/sJobview.jsp?function=View&id=05R0660 * Software Engineers: http://www.jobs.soton.ac.uk/adminweb/jsp/jobs/sJobview.jsp?function=View&id=05R0661 * Technical Author:http://www.jobs.soton.ac.uk/adminweb/jsp/jobs/sJobview.jsp?function=View&id=05R0662 NeSC News 3 www.nesc.ac.uk Issue 40, April 2006 Call for Papers: SPECIAL ISSUE ON DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND eSCIENCE International Journal on Digital Libraries http://www.dlese.org/IJDL_eScience/ : IMPORTANT DATES Submissions are due: June 1, 2006 / Acceptance notifications: Sep 1, 2006 TOPIC OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE There are an increasing number of initiatives in several countries targeted at supporting research into new forms of computational infrastructure intended to transform the conduct of scientific research in areas such as chemistry, atmospheric science, and earth science. These initiatives, which go under a variety of names including eScience, eResearch, and cyberinfrastructure, are a response to the changing nature of scientific research, particularly in the natural and physical sciences, which is increasingly dependent upon large data sets and high-end analysis and visualization tools. eScience approaches and techniques are also beginning to appear in other disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences. Research issues being addressed in these initiatives include information retrieval, information modeling, ontologies, systems interoperability, and policy issues associated with providing transparent access to complex data sets. As such, these initiatives are concerned with many of the same research issues that the international digital library community has been grappling with for the past decade. The purpose of this special issue is to critically examine the role that digital libraries can and should play in this emerging eScience computational infrastructure. Bringing the digital library and the emerging scientific infrastructure worlds together can lay the foundation for providing truly integrated support for the entire process of science, from formulation of research questions to the publication of the outcomes. Papers are invited on the technical, social, and policy dimensions of eScience and digital libraries. SUBMISSIONS Due to the emerging nature of this field, we welcome a broad variety of lengths and publication types. All submissions need to relate to the field of eScience, however. Please contact one of the editors for feedback and guidance. Manuscripts must be written in English and should include a cover page with title, name and address (including email address) of author(s), an abstract, and a list of keywords. Authors are encouraged to follow the formatting instructions at: http://cimic.rutgers.edu/~ijdl/submission_index.htm **Papers must be submitted via the web site: http://www.softconf.com/start/IJDL_escience** eProtein Scientific Meeting and Workshop Euro-Southeast Asia 2006 ICT Forum. The EMBL-EBI, together with Imperial College London (IC) and University College London (UCL), are delighted to invite you to attend a one-day scientific meeting on Protein and Genome Annotations on 24th April. The European Commission, with the support of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),is organising Euro-Southeast Asia 2006 Information and Communications Technologies Forum (www.eusea2006.org). EUSEA2006 is an open co-operation platform for European and Southeast Asian ICT players to foster business, research, policy and regulatory collaboration. The meeting is funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry, BBSRC and the BioSapiens EU Project. The aim of the meeting is to describe the current approaches, both technical and scientific, which will allow contributions and access to annotations from many different laboratories, based on GRID DAS technologies. The meeting will be followed by a two-day practical workshop addressing the use and implementation of the systems designed by the eProtein partners. Hosted within IMBX Singapore’s infocomm & media business exchange week 19-23 June 2006, the EUSEA2006 conference for over 800+ Europeans and Southeast Asian key ICT players will foster mutually beneficial business, research, policy and regulatory collaboration and opportunities. EUSEA2006 offers a unique opportunity to hear about policy, regulatory and research issues from key European & SEA experts, to network, attend workshops and training courses and to forge future ICT alliances. eProtein, a three-year project funded through the BBSRC E-Science and Bioinformatics Initiative, has addressed structure-based annotation of protein sequences in the major genomes using GRID technology to link the resources at the three sites; http://www.e-protein.org. The meeting will showcase this work and provide in-depth seminars and training on the computational and biological aspects of the project. The EUSEA2006 Exhibition, the European ICT Pavilion, will showcase latest European innovative technologies, products and solutions in Audio-Visual, Satellite, Security & Telecommunications to over 47,000 ICT professionals at CommunicAsia2006 Trade Fair from 20th to 23rd June 2006, Singapore, the perfect backdrop for learningall about the ICT market in Southeast Asia. The programme includes presentations from several partners of the BioSapiens Network of Excellence, who will describe how they are building on the work begun by the eProtein project. Participation is free of charge but subject to registration on-line at www.eusea2006.org The meeting will be held at the Wellcome Trust Conference Centre, Hinxton, UK, on 24th April 2006, and registration is free of charge. Please register on the conference website, http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Information/events/eprotein. Places at the workshops are limited and participants will be contacted after registration to confirm availability. NeSC News 4 www.nesc.ac.uk Issue 40, April 2006 e-Science Institute Call for Workshops and Meeting Proposals and Theme Topics Call for Proposals to run Meetings and Workshops at the e-Science Institute Call for Topics for the e-Science Institute Thematic Programme The e-Science Institute invites proposals for meetings and workshops to be run over the next twelve months commencing in June 2006. The e-Science Institute invites proposals for new themes to be run over the next two years. Theme topics, as well as being interesting in their own right, should address issues that are relevant to applications researchers and be able to demonstrate significant buy in from both the applications and computational scientist communities. It is not intended that they address only the sciences – all areas of academic research present opportunities for the application of e-Science techniques. eSI will pay for 1 or 2 speakers a day and will provide the usual support in the form of experienced staff, organisation and facilities. Researchers who want to organise a workshop to engage in collaborative work (e.g. ‘hackathons’) should also consider applying to the visitor programme for additional funds to enable them to engage a larger group of participants. To continue our rolling thematic programme, we are now calling for proposals for topics for future themes to start August 2006 or later. These will be reviewed by the eSI Science Advisory Board which will meet in early June 2006, and should be submitted no later than 19th April 2006 for initial consideration by the Programme Committee. Proposals for theme topics can be made either by the research community in which case eSI will undertake to try to find an appropriate leader, or potential theme leaders may put themselves forward along with the theme they wish to develop. Proposals for meetings will have to show a clear link with e-Science – whether with well developed existing communities or new communities in the early stages of applying e-Science techniques to their research. eSI is actively looking to support activities across all academic disciplines and encourages new communities to take advantage of the significant expertise we can offer, in particular in putting them in touch with technical experts and computational scientists already engaged in e-Science. Further information on eSI themes is available at: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/themes/index.htm Initial enquiries should be made by emailing lee@nesc.ac.uk to check on availability. To propose a theme or if you have any questions on Themes or Meetings and Workshops, please contact Anna Kenway by email anna@nesc.ac.uk or +44 (0)131 650 9818 Proposals should be submitted no later than 19th April 2006 for initial consideration by that committee. Further information on the eSI responsive mode is available at: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/arranging_events.html EGEE II Project started The Enabling Grids for e-science project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 90 institutions in over 30 countries world-wide to provide a seamless Grid infrastructure for e-Science that is available for scientists 24 hours-a-day. Conceived from the start as a four-year project, the second two-year phase started on 1 April 2006, and is funded by the European Commission. Researchers in academia and industry already benefit from the EGEE e-Infrastructure, which simultaneously supports many applications from diverse scientific areas, providing a common pool of resources, independent of geographic location, with round-the-clock access to major storage, compute and networking facilities. Expanding from originally two scientific fields, high energy physics and life sciences, EGEE now integrates applications from many other scientific fields, ranging from geology to computational chemistry. The EGEE-II project will significantly extend and consolidate this infrastructure, which links national, regional and thematic Grid efforts, as well as interoperate with other Grids around the globe. The resulting high capacity, world-wide infrastructure greatly surpasses the capabilities of local clusters and individual centres, providing a unique tool for collaborative compute-intensive science (“e-Science”). So far, several large- and small-scale communities use the EGEE infrastructure as an every-day tool for their work. The EGEE production service is constantly growing, currently combining more than 20 000 CPUs and 10PB of storage in more than 200 sites worldwide. Applications deployed come from High Energy Physics, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences (including the industrial application EGEODE), Astrophysics, and Computational Chemistry. EGEE-II will expand the portfolio of supported applications to include Fusion as well as other disciplines. The next generation EGEE middleware “gLite” will improve the infrastructure and form an even more dependable and scalable resource, able to meet the needs of a large, diverse e-Science user community. For more information: http://www.eu-egee.org/ NeSC News 5 www.nesc.ac.uk Issue 40, April 2006 Forthcoming Events April 27-28 eFrameworks meets eScience e-Science Institute, Edinburgh 27 ATLAS e-Science Project - Introductory software training course e-Science Institute, Edinburgh http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/ events/669/ 4-5 DEISA SYMPOSIUM: Perspectives in High Performance Computing Bolonga, Italy www.deisa.org/symposium 16 Browsing Genes and Genomes with Ensembl e-Science Institute, Edinburgh http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/ events/678/ 17 Browsing Genes and Genomes with Ensembl e-Science Institute, Edinburgh http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/ events/677/ 17 DCC Associate Network Meeting e-Science Institute, Edinburgh http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/ events/673/ 27 Ontology Engineering & Automated Reasoning e-Science Institute, Edinburgh http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/ events/668/ International Summer School on Grid Computing Jolly Hotel Delle Terme, Ischia, Italy http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/ ISSGC06/ All Hands Meeting 2006 East Midlands Conference Centre http://www.allhands.org.uk/index. html GridPP e-Science Institute, Edinburgh May July 9-21 September 18-21 October 31-2 Nov F/T Video Communications Technologist Department of Computer Science University College London This month NeSc would like to welcome two new members of staff: Iain Coleman is the new Technical PA and will be working with both Malcolm Atkinson for Gridnet 2 and Jennifer Schopf for JISC. We are looking for a talented self-starter to pilot, monitor, maintain and develop all UCL’s video conferencing facilities including ACCESS GRID, which are operated by the Research Computing Community and the Media Resources Department. The role is strongly client-oriented and requires excellent communication and skills. Experience in the development and presentation of training programmes would be highly advantageous. Lilly Hunter starts this month as the ICEAGE Project manager, working with the Training, outreach and Education Team. Vacancy in Interactive European Grids project This is a new post and therefore the post-holder will play a key role in determining how these services will develop in the future. Salary will be on UCL Grade 7, £27,286 - £33,006 per annum including London Allowance. The project will pick up the work started in CrossGrid in May and will be done in collaboration with EGEE. HOW TO APPLY: Full details and an application form can be A contract of 2 years will be offered to the successful candidate starting on 1st May 2006. found at www.ucl.ac.uk/mediares/support/jobs.htm For details, please contact Mr Kunze@iwr.fzk.de. Please send applications to Mrs Maeurer@hps.fzk.de NGS Executive Director Reference Number: 136/2006 A vacancy has arisen for a full time Executive Director to oversee the operation and development of the NGS and the GOSC. This new role will be key to the future operational success of the NGS and the Director will take the lead in developments to integrate the NGS with project and campus based grid initiatives and the emerging European e-Infrastructure. If you would like to hold an e-Science event at the e-Science Institute, please contact: Conference Administrator, National e-Science Centre, 15 South College Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AA Tel: 0131 650 9833 / Fax: 0131 650 9819 / Email: events@nesc.ac.uk For more information contact Neil Geddes on +44 1235 446084, or email N.I.Geddes@rl.ac.uk. NeSC News 6 www.nesc.ac.uk