The National e-Science Centre Report
2001–2002
e-Science Report
Contents
Contents
Directors Report
5
NeSC Report
7
Overview of NeSC
7
Resources
11
Activities
14
e-Science Institute Report
17
Overview
17
Events
18
Opening
18
Bluegene
20
GGF5/HPDC11
20
Visitors to eSI
22
Plans
22
Projects
23
OGSA/DAI
23
Sun Data and Compute Grids (SunDCG)
24
Gridweaver
25
eDIKT
26
Manager’s Report
28
Staff
28
Finance
31
Buildings
34
IT infrastructure
35
Appendix
Details of Events to 31 July 2002
37
37
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e-Science Report
Director’s Report
page 5
Director’s Report
As Director of the National e-Science Centre, I have been privileged to work at the forefront of the UK’s
national e-Science programme; providing leadership of UK-based research, and promoting UK e-Science
within the global community. It has been exciting for me to preside over a period of such widespread
uptake and all-inclusive research development.
e-Science will provide technology which can transform research in any discipline. By combining
the expertise of the world’s leading experimentalists, theoreticians and computing scientists, we will
develop distributed computing systems that are capable of storing and analysing the ever expanding
volumes of data produced by today’s scientific researchers. Extensive global collaborations will become
a possibility, advancing the capabilities of computing, communication and visualisation.
At the National e-Science
Centre, we have led the UK in
developing software to deliver a
range of components for database
“e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science
and the next generation that will enable it.”
Malcolm Atkinson
Director,
National e-Science Centre
“e-Science will change the way in which science is undertaken.” 1
access across the Grid. We are also engaged in strategically crucial work at the Global Grid Forum (GGF);
representing the UK’s interests at GGF working groups and participating in discussions which have led
to the deployment of Grid enabling software. The OGSA-DAI group in particular is working closely
alongside its international counterparts to deliver Grid services to the widespread scientific community.
Our e-Science Institute has become a focus for expertise in many scientific disciplines, drawing
together the world’s leading researchers to realise the potential of e-Science at our e-Science Institute.
The focus of meetings and workshops has varied from research in a particular domain, such as the Blue
Gene Protein Folding Conference, to metadata and workflow management which is common to the wider
spectrum of scientific disciplines.
For anybody who has witnessed the enthusiasm generated by new possibilities, and the crossculture knowledge integration we have fostered here at NeSC, it would be impossible to ignore the
widespread impact and potential of e-Science. It is equally impossible to ignore the amount of work
which NeSC has done in such a short time towards developing these possibilities and realising this
potential. It has been deeply satisfying for me personally to preside over a period of such sustained
growth, and as the Director of NeSC I look forward to many future challenges in e-Science and High
Performance Computation.
Our Vision
The future of the National e-Science Centre is intertwined with the future of e-Science in the UK,
Europe, and globally. We must play a leading role at all levels, responding to needs, researching
methodology, and pioneering new technology.
We will do this in conjunction with our five foundation departments, with our colleagues in the
UK, and through our strong collaborative links with e-Science programmes in other countries. We will
continue to lead high-quality research, concentrating on the ongoing challenge of managing scientific
data, supporting the scientists who use it and developing technology for analyses that combine leadingedge data resources and intensive computation. This research will be driven by demanding goals and
dedicated operational resources: capability computing, high-volume storage and expert data curation.
Our long term commitment to specific projects will yield better understanding of data life-cycles, and
the research patterns that they enable.
1 John Taylor, Director
General of Research Councils,
Office of Science and
Technology.
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Director’s Report
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We also understand that the long-term growth of e-Science depends upon engaging and enabling
cohorts of new researchers. This requires that e-Science permeates post-doctoral, doctoral and MSc
education within the next three years. NeSC should play a leading role, in pioneering and publicising the
relevant educational standards – in addition to training, which is already developing. Academic resources
will be required. These should capitalise on existing centres of excellence at the National e-Science
Centre and at the eight UK regional centres.
The future at NeSC must be holistic. We must combine our constituent ethos – experimentation,
theory, computation – integrating existing infrastructure for major application research with our own
research and outreach. We should address science of every scale; sciences with small, complex datasets
are of equal importance to those with huge quantitative demands. Work done on a desktop PC should
transfer fluently to the largest supercomputer when the need arises. All scientific research should be able
to capitalise on the potential of e-Science.
e-Science Report
Overview of NeSC
page 7
The signing of the
official agreement.
Front row left to right:
Raye Brown, DTI, Tony
Hey, DTI, Sir Stewart
Sutherland, Principal of
the University of
Edinburgh, W G Hill,
Dean of the Faculty of
Science & Engineering,
the University of
Edinburgh.
NeSC Report
Overview of NeSC
The origins of NeSC lay in the UK government’s decision in 2000 to allocate £120M of public money to
e-Science, stimulated by John Taylor’s vision of globally distributed computing and the ‘virtual
organisation’. £35 million was allocated to the UK e-Science Core Programme, to develop infrastructure,
coordination and support for pilot research projects. The remaining £85M was distributed amongst the
UK scientific research councils to develop Grid research relevant to UK science.
In March 2001, Tony Hey was appointed Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme. One of his
first duties in office was to invite bids for the eight regional e-Science Centres, and one National e-Science
Centre. On the 6th of June 2001, a consortium led by Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities won the right
to inaugurate the UK’s National e-Science Centre.
NeSC officially came into being on the 1st August 2001, in temporary accommodation at the
Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The location for the e-Science Institute, a converted church at
15 South College Street, Edinburgh, was contributed by the University of Edinburgh.
The National e-Science Centre has defined its mission as:
‘To stimulate and sustain the development of e-Science in the UK, to
contribute significantly to its international development and to ensure
that its techniques are rapidly propagated to commerce and industry.’
To deliver this mission it has set up an infrastructure, established the e-Science Institute and
developed a working programme, as described in this report.
The Structure
The National e-Science Centre presents an integrated external image. Internally it is quite a complex
organisation.
Two Universities
In May 2001, the Principals of Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities recognised their growing collaboration
in a number of areas of e-Science. As e-Science frequently involves multi-organisation collaborations,
it was agreed that the two Universities could substantially accelerate their uptake and development of
e-Science by working together.
Two collaborative projects that pre-date NeSC are:
• Scottish Centre for Genomic Technology and Informatics
• ScotGrid: an investigation of a Tier2 Data Centre for Particle Physics Experiments
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Overview of NeSC
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These are both funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, who have also provided
£2.3M funds under the SRIF scheme to improve communication infrastructure for e-Science, including
connections between the Universities.
After the award of the National e-Science Centre to the two Universities, they developed a
Collaboration Agreement to manage the project. They also jointly appointed Malcolm Atkinson,
previously a Professor in Computing Science at Glasgow, and seconded him to be the Director of NeSC.
The e-Science Institute
The e-Science Institute is more than a building to house the activities of NeSC in Edinburgh. It is a
national resource, holding a range of Research, Community Building, and Training events as well as
hosting International Collaboration meetings. It also runs an international visitors programme, which is
intended to establish eSI as a recognised center for collaborative research. The resources and activities
of the e-Science Institute are described in a dedicated section of this report.
NeSC Projects
One of the main goals of NeSC (as with the regional e-Science Centres) is to develop and manage a wide
portfolio of collaborative projects with industry focused on developing middleware and application
solutions in the e-Science arena. In the first instance, funding for these projects has come from the
DTI/EPSRC Grid Core Programme. A grant of £3 million over three years has been made available to NeSC
for this purpose.
The NeSC Grid Core Programme (GCP) funding is designed to fund collaborative projects with
industrial and commercial partners to develop open core Grid middleware for the benefit of the project
partners and the wider e-Science community. The GCP funding from DTI/EPSRC pays the full costs of the
NeSC partners involved matched by ‘in-kind’ contributions from the project’s industrial and commercial
partners. In-kind can be anything from cash, to equipment, to software licenses, to company effort.
The Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) has also funded a project at NeSC. Called
eDIKT, this project will link leading edge research into data management techniques with the needs of
working e-scientists. The intention is for the eDIKT team to be a catalyst. By identifying problems faced
by application scientists, they will provide challenges to computer scientists, and by identifying promising
techniques in the computer science, they will provide better solutions to the application scientists. The
eDIKT team will aid the process by providing software development expertise and capacity,
Five Foundation Departments
NeSC is built on the existing success of five departments at the two Universities: Physics and Astronomy,
Edinburgh; Physics and Astronomy, Glasgow; EPCC, Edinburgh; Computing Science, Glasgow and
Informatics, Edinburgh. These foundation departments jointly proposed and established NeSC.
Physics and Astronomy, Edinburgh
Richard Kenway leads the UKQCD Consortium, which is developing a QCD machine on a chip (QCDOC), in
a £6.6M collaboration with Columbia University. This architecture is an antecedent of IBM's BlueGene/L
computers, which will be announced at Supercomputing 2002. The project will install a 10 Tflop/s peak
machine at Edinburgh in 2004 and this will be integrated with the UKQCD Grid which is being developed
as part of the GridPP project. The UKQCD Grid is already in operation providing data management
services for the Consortium. It is planned to evolve into a computation Grid for QCDOC data analysis over
the next two years.
Andy Lawrence leads the AstroGrid pilot project and the UK's role in several other international
projects to develop a virtual observatory, where data from multiple parts of the spectrum and from
e-Science Report
different times can be conveniently used by astronomers.
Overview of NeSC
page 9
This builds on substantial experience
building and managing large digital sky surveys at the Institute for Astronomy, housed in the Royal
Observatory Edinburgh.
Physics and Astronomy, Glasgow
Tony Doyle leads GridPP, which is developing an operational Grid across the UK in a PPARC-funded £17m
three-year project. Middleware developments are being pursued within the EU DataGrid project where
Gavin McCance plays a leading role and is Deputy Manager for the Grid Data Management Work Package
and Paul Millar is the Grid Data Management member of the Integration Team. US-based work at
Fermilab is being co-led by Rick St Denis for the CDF experiment's Data Handling Group.
Within the Department, the focus is on meeting the requirements of particle physics experiment,
theory, bioinformatics, Grid data management and information retrieval users. This is being performed as
part of the JREI SHEFC-funded ScotGrid project to establish a Tier-2 Computing Facility in Scotland meeting
the petabyte-scale requirements of LHC Computing using Grid technology. This builds upon substantial
experience building and managing large data servers within the Glasgow Particle Physics Experiment Group.
EPCC, Edinburgh
Tony Doyle
University of Glasgow
EPCC has over 60 staff and 12 years experience in: running the high-end parallel computers required to
address the challenging computations arising in e-Science, research in fundamental novel computing
techniques, and training in HPC methods and technology transfer to industry and commerce. EPCC is
taking the leading role in managing the new UK supercomputer project, HPCx, a six-year £54M contract,
which will deliver one of the world’s ten fastest computers for UK science.
EPCC has a well-established capability in commercialisation and an extensive involvement in
European Programmes. Currently these include a major role in preparing projects for Framework VI and
they currently lead two Grid-related Framework V projects:
GRIDSTART: has the specific objective of consolidating Grid technical advances in Europe, encouraging
interaction amongst similar activities both in Europe and the rest of the world and stimulating the early
take-up of this technology by industry.
ENACTS: co-ordinates the activities and planning of 14 supercomputer centres and numerous user
groups across Europe in Grid and HPC, with the aim of distilling best-practice and providing a roadmap
for the EC.
Computing Science, Glasgow
Computing Science at Glasgow has focused primarily on developing applications, in collaboration with
scientists. For example, Paul Cockshott leads a number of projects involving 3D imaging. These include
collaborative research with the cardiac MRI unit on developing techniques to give animated cardiac
images showing areas of disease; compression of microscopy images; 3D television studios. He is also
the principle author of a collaborative project on the use of the Grid to support a virtual organisation
with the computer generated animation company Pepper’s Ghost.
David Gilbert leads the newly established Bioinformatics Research Centre which brings together
researchers in computer science, mathematics, and the life sciences. At Glasgow he leads the numerous
projects including a £5.5M Wellcome Trust project on Cardiovascular Functional Genomics with the
focus on hypertension. He is Principle Investigator together with Muffy Calder in a large DTI funded
Beacon Project (under the Harnessing the Genome Programme) concerned with developing a software
tool for analyzing biochemical pathways and leading research into formalisms and techniques for
modelling and analyzing concurrency in cell signaling pathways.
Arthur Trew
Director of EPCC
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Overview of NeSC
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Informatics, Edinburgh
The School of Informatics was one of only six computing departments in the UK to have obtained a 5*
ranking in the 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise. It returned the highest number of research active
staff and was the only 5*A department. It contains world-class research groups in the areas of
theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and bioinformatics, among others.
Professor Don Sannella leads a team investigating the use of proof-carrying code to enforce
resource guarantees for mobile code. This should be very useful in a Grid context, for ensuring that
services meet their advertised behaviour.
Paul Anderson leads the team that developed the LFCG configuration management system. This is
used by the European Data Grid and is being enhanced to meet their needs. He also leads the ‘GridWeaver’
proposal, in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard, to develop this technology for managing Grid systems.
Members of the school are active in two recently approved Interdisciplinary Research
Collaborations: Dependability, and Advanced Knowledge Technologies.
Our First Year
The National e-Science Centre has had a productive and exciting first year. We began in temporary
accommodation, building a programme in several small steps, By March 2002 we had a dedicated
building, fitted out to our requirements, and an event programme that was already more active than we
had envisaged. The year culminated with two major events: the official opening by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer Gordon Brown, and the largest meeting to date of the Global Grid Forum.
Beginning NeSC
During August 2001 the first meetings were held at the e-Science Institute. The UK e-Science Directors’
Forum initiated regular meetings between the directors of the nine e-Science centres, the UK Grid
Support Centre, and the e-Science Core Programme Directorate. The Grid Users’ Meeting illustrated
many common interests across the sciences. The workshop on Databases and the Grid discussed a paper
by Paul Watson and led to the launch of the UK Database Task Force.
In October we attended the Global Grid Forum 3 in Rome and began discussions with Ian Foster,
leader of the Globus project, on the potential for the Grid architecture of the distributed computing
model emerging as Web Services. Steve Tuecke, chief architect of the Globus development team, flew
in and energetically launched our training programme with an intensive tutorial on Globus Toolkit 2.
Our ‘Getting Going with the Grid’ workshop was the first example of our workshops designed
to establish collaboration in the UK e-Science community. November saw a number of meetings
Steve Tuecke during the
Globus Toolkit 2 tutorial.
relating to particular fields of research, such as quantum chromodynamics, experimental particle physics
and astronomy.
Building our Programme
In early December the Scottish Higher Education Council awarded us a Strategic Research Development
Grant of £2.4M for the eDIKT project, to devise novel software tools for the analysis of existing data. We
were also privileged to welcome Ian Foster to the Centre for an extended meeting of the UK Architectural
Task Force. This allowed us to develop the newly proposed Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
January 2002 saw us hosting a four-day Globus workshop for UK researchers. Steve Tuecke led an
excellent four days’ tuition, in conjunction with the European Data Grid and his Globus colleagues. This
was immediately followed by a meeting of the six e-Science pilot projects funded by the EPSRC.
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Overview of NeSC
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On to February, and the OGSA design effort was publicly announced at GGF4, whilst the UK
Database Task force led to a successful ‘birds of a feather’ session. We started work on our first major
centre project, OGSA-DAI. This is a collaboration with IBM, Oracle, and the e-Science Centres in
Newcastle and in Manchester. We produced a UK e-Science technical paper about this work.
Our events and systems support teams heroically prepared for the Blue Gene workshop in just two
days. This was a joint venture with IBM, and a stimulating international research meeting on protein
science was the result. There followed an intensive month of meetings, including a week of hands-on
training workshops for e-scientists pioneering the use of web services and OGSA.
NeSC Officially Open and Operational
On the 25th April 2002, the National e-Science Centre was officially opened by the Rt Hon. Gordon
Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer. More than 200 of the UK’s leading researchers, politicians and
Freddie Moran of IBM.
journalists attended the opening, which consisted of an intensive programme of discussion and
demonstration, demonstrating the breadth and vitality of the UK e-Science Community.
June 2002 saw a UK first, with the hands-on training workshop IBM delivered in partnership with
NeSC on DiscoveryLink. This was the first time a UK company had addressed the UK e-Science
Community at the e-Science Institute. Another UK first quickly followed, in the form an international
collaboration meeting with Chinese e-Scientists and Bioinformaticians.
July was a month like no other. We hosted GGF for its first meeting in the UK, in conjunction with the
11 Symposium on High Performance Digital Computing, at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
th
GGF5 was spectacularly well received, attracting over 900 delegates as opposed to 400 at GGF4 in
Toronto. The two conferences ran in tandem with a number of co-located workshops and meetings, for
two intense weeks of concerted activity, at the height (and vibrancy) of Edinburgh’s tourist season. Our
dual site was used to advantage, with the Grid Applications workshop and SUN High Performance
Computing consortium being held in Glasgow.
Dave Pearson of Oracle.
Resources
Web Information System
NeSC provides a Web Information System for all e-Science activities in the UK. It includes summaries
of all e-Science projects and events, with links to the regional e-Science centres and the Grid Support
Centre. It also provides a news service, and a secure area for use by the UK e-Science directorate.
When considering the basis for Web design, we decided early in the process to concentrate on the
content rather than the style, and agreed a number of criteria:
• The Web would largely be a repository of
information for the UK e-Science community.
• Platform/browser independent (as far as
possible)
• Easy to adapt
• Navigation pages fit on screen
• Easy to navigate/search on every page
• Easy to maintain (including by admin staff)
• Each page to offer opportunity for feedback
• A secure area
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Central to making the content easy to maintain, was our decision to drive the Web pages from a
database. Information could either be fed in by Web forms (e.g. registration for events) or directly into
the database by administrative staff. Information in the database would then be used to generate
dynamic (in response to queries) or static web pages, and for management purposes. We opted for
SQLServer as the database, with Cold Fusion as the application server to the Web pages. SQLServer has
the advantage that it connects to Microsoft Access via ODBC in an error free way, allowing admin staff
to utilise the user friendly and flexible querying features of the Access front end. The use of Cold Fusion
was a known technology in Glasgow Computer Science, and so we were able to implement (in particular)
web event registration very quickly.
Both the database and the hierarchical structure of the web pages underwent a formal design
process. Both have grown out of all proportion, in comparison to what was originally intended. The
database originally had 17 tables – it now contains 50, so that it is no longer possible to show the
schema in a readable format in A4. Because of the OO nature of the database, it has been possible to
extend this in a logical way to accommodate the increasing demands for services. The web pages
currently offer the following information:
• Information about NeSC and links to other e-Science centres.
• Front page News flash and archive (database driven). News items date and archive automatically.
• Web-based registration for events and to join the mailing list. (Note that having registered
once, users need only enter their email address and surname to register for future events.)
• Structured archiving of material from previous events.
• Web based applications for GridNet and the Visitor Programme.
• Areas for groups such as Grid Network Team (GNT) to publish information.
• The UK e-Science programme publishes a technical report series, and these are presented on
the Web.
• A secure SSL website for management information for the e-Science Core Programme .
• A web system for Core Programme staff to manage e-Science projects for the UK.
Access Grid
The Access Grid is a collaboration tool for distributed groups. It can be used for meetings, brainstorm
sessions, seminars, and similar activities. Each node includes microphones and cameras to transmit
sounds and images of the presenters, and a large display area to show images from other sites. In
addition, the display can show computer-based material, allowing collaborative development of
documents or other software.
For more information on the Access Grid technology, see the Grid Support Centre web pages at
www.grid-support.ac.uk/
NeSC currently runs two Access Grid nodes, with a third planned:
• Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
• E-Science Institute, Edinburgh
• Glasgow Computer Science Department
Each node uses two Windows machines to manage the display, and two Linux machines for video
and audio capture.
The EPCC node was set up in November 2001. It uses three back projectors and four pan & tilt
cameras. The node’s four PCs are connected directly to the University’s 100MB multimedia backbone
network, and from there out onto JANET.
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Access Grid
demonstration of
Telemedicine.
The e-Science Institute (eSI) node was set up in April 2002. It uses three ceiling mounted
projectors, four pan & tilt cameras, and four microphones. The node’s four PCs pass data to one another
via a 100MB network, which is connected directly to the same backbone as the EPCC node.
A Glasgow node is planned, and should be ready in September 2002. It will run on four dual
processor IBM IntelliStations. It will have three ceiling mounted projectors and two pan & tilt cameras.
The node’s four machines will pass data to one another via a Gigabit switch, which in turn hooks into
the department’s 100MB backbone, and from there to the Campus and out onto JANET.
We have used the Access Grid for regular cross-site meetings, to join meetings of the UK
Engineering Task Force, to broadcast events to the rest of the UK, and various other activities. We plan
to extend the use of the Access Grid in the future. To this end, we plan to purchase a portable Access
Grid node that can be deployed in different locations. This will add more flexibility to the possible use
of the Access Grid, for example by allowing larger meetings to join the Grid, or for small meetings to use
the Grid while the main room is used for other activities.
Research Computing Facilities
NeSC has a small number of machines for research use, in addition to the computing infrastructure for
the e-Science Institute and the equipment for running the Access Grid. In the future we plan to increase
both the number of machines at NeSC, and to use Grid technology to link other computing facilities in
the two Universities (and other neighbouring institutes).
Glasgow
In Glasgow, the e-Science team has at its disposal a Power3 based IBM PSeries running AIX 5.1, a dual
processor IBM IntelliStation and a 4-processor IBM Netfiniti server running Linux and a 4-processor Sun
Enterprise450 running Solaris 7. The Netfiniti and IntelliStation have been generously loaned by IBM,
together with over 0.5 Terabytes of disk space. Memory ranges from 512MB to 4GB on the AIX machine,
and most of the machines have Gigabit Ethernet cards providing the capability of fast communications
between machines via a local Gigabit switch. This affords a good mix of hardware and Operating
Systems and gives us experimental flexibility.
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We have installed version 2.2 of the Globus Toolkit on the Sun e450. We are currently in the process
of linking this machine to other Globus enabled-machines, which will enable us to send and receive jobs
to and from remote sites. Locally, we run Condor and Sun Grid Engine job scheduling software.
In addition to these machines there are numerous other supercomputers and clusters located
around the University of Glasgow. For example, the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
has an 8x SGI Origin 2000 processor; a 30x Sun Enterprise processor; a 32x SGI Origin 300 processor and
a 40x IBM pSeries 640.
Edinburgh
Currently, the main research machine at Edinburgh is an IBM Netfinity 7600 on loan from IBM. This
machine has four Processors, 7GB RAM, and 1TB of disk, and runs Linux. This is used for a variety of
purposes.
For collaborative projects, we have access to other facilities at Edinburgh. Highest among these is
the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, one of the founding departments of NeSC. The main EPCC
machine is Lomond, a Sun e6800 running Solaris.
In the forthcoming year, we expect to have an IBM p690 ‘Regatta’ server, donated by IBM from
their Shared University Research Programme. This machine is likely to have 16 processors, 128GB RAM
and 2.1TB of disk.
Our plans include a machine for the eDIKT project. This machine will be funded from that project,
and will be put out to tender. We are also planning a Storage Area Network that will link a range of
research machines.
Extending the network
ScotGRID is a £800k centre in Scotland for the analysis of data primarily from the ATLAS and LHCb
experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. The centre currently consists of a 128CPU Monte Carlo
production facility run by the Glasgow PPE group and a 5TB datastore and associated high-performance
server run by Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre.
SHEFC have funded a 1Gb/sec e-Science network via the SRIF programme. This connects all the
NeSC sites, and will enable Grid-related research to use dedicated high-bandwidth connections. The
ScotGrid project is also planning to use this network to connect its machines. This network will form
the basis of our integration with other computing facilities in the two Universities. It will also include
neighbouring institutions, such as the MRC’s Human Genome Unit.
Activities
This section describes the activities of the National e-Science Centre, except for the e-Science Institute
and the NeSC projects. These activities fall into three main areas: Grid Engineering, Research, and
International Representation.
Grid Engineering
We use the term ‘Grid Engineering’ to cover our contribution to setting up the UK e-Science Grid, support
activities for users of this (and other) Grids, and the general development of Grid middleware.
Contributions to the UK Engineering Task Force
The Engineering Task Force (ETF) of the UK Core Grid Programme consists of representatives from all the
e-Science centres in the UK. The ETF co-ordinates Grid engineering activities, and provides a forum
where the e-Science centres can learn from each other. Currently the ETF has an ongoing project to
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Resources
build a single, connected Grid for the UK e-Science community. A so-called ‘Level 1’ Grid is establishing
basic connectivity between distributed sites.
NeSC has contributed in several ways to the UK ETF over the past year. We have built a Level 1
Grid at both Edinburgh and Glasgow. This was based on version 2.0 of the Globus Toolkit. At Edinburgh,
EPCC’s main high-performance computing server, a Sun e3500, was connected to the Grid. At Glasgow,
the Grid was installed on a 4-CPU Sun e450.
In addition to installation and development work, Stephen Booth chaired the ETF working group on
firewalls, and wrote the ETF report. NeSC members also contributed to other ETF reports. NeSC provided
prototype software combing the Globus GSI security model with web service support, which has been
used both as a basis for OGSI implementation work and by other projects who needed this functionality.
Contributions to the UK Grid Support Centre
The Grid Support Centre (GSC) of the UK Core Grid Programme provides resources to help e-Science
projects to set up grid infrastructure. The GSC runs a central web site (www.grid-support.ac.uk/), and
funds several people to evaluate systems and support projects in their region.
NeSC has one member of staff who is fully funded by the Grid Support Centre. As NeSC contribution
to the GSC, we are developing expertise with installing and configuring the Globus toolkit on Solaris and AIX.
Middleware development
At NeSC, we are undertaking our own Grid engineering work, as well as contributing to the ETF and GSC.
In particular, we are supporting our projects and those of our partners, particularly OGSA-DAI, eDIKT, and
Astrogrid. These projects make substantial use of the newer Globus technology, based on OGSA,
which will be implemented in version 3 of the Globus toolkit. Currently we are using preview releases
of this technology.
We are also evaluating other Grid technologies. An example here is the Giggle replication toolkit,
which is being evaluated by the eDIKT project.
Currently we have a particular interest in creating test workloads for Grids. We plan to create test
frameworks for a variety of real applications. These frameworks will record success and performance of
test runs. This will allow us to test and compare a range of Grid technologies and deployments. As with
the rest of our Grid engineering work, we are particularly interested in OGSA-based applications.
NeSC has provided many workshops and courses on Grid technology, as described elsewhere in this
report. We will continue this programme. In particular, we are planning several events based on OGSA
and version 3 of the Globus toolkit.
International Representation
As the UK National e-Science Centre, NeSC has a particular role to represent the UK-e-Science
programme internationally. We perform this task in conjunction with the e-Science directorate and the
national task forces, as well as the regional e-Science Centres.
NeSC is fulfilling its international role through numerous avenues. We have provided members of
programme committees for Global Grid Forum meetings 4 to 7, and the High-Performance Distributed
Computing conferences 11 and 12. We have also attended major conferences such as SuperComputing
01 and CANARIE 7. We have visited major research centres in the USA, including Argonne National
Laboratory, Information Systems Institute, NCSA and San Diego Supercomputer Centre, as well as
meetings of American research projects such as NPACI.
We also take part in so-called ‘N+N’ meetings, in which a number of researchers from the UK meet
a similar number of researchers from another country. As an example, more than thirty-five delegates,
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representing over twenty-four organisations in the UK and China, met at NeSC
for an N+N meeting organised by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences
Research Council. Delegates from both countries met to discuss a variety of eScience topics, including drug discovery, structural genomics and biodiversity.
Through the hosting of major events such as Global Grid Forum 5 and the
11th Symposium on High Performance Digital Computing, the international
visibility of NeSC as a hosting venue and centre of excellence in e-Science and
Grid technologies has increased considerably.
NeSC has gained international recognition for its software development,
especially through work such as OGSA-DAI. The OGSA-DAI work is also driving
through critical standardisation activities (GGF Data Access and Integration
Services Working Group) which will underpin future OGSA-based Grid
applications. Members of the Globus team have visited NeSC and given courses.
China N+N meeting
in Edinburgh.
We work with members of several European projects, including the European Data Grid and the
European Virtual Observatory. We have also contributed to the European Framework programme via
such projects as GridStart and ENACTS.
Research
We intend to make the National e-Science Centre become a thriving research community, producing
world-class research. We will host visiting academics, post-doctoral researchers, and PhD students. We
will develop their e-Science skills, and extend global understanding of e-Science issues.
Our plan is to begin building on research activity in the NeSC foundation departments, and on our
existing links to other projects. We are enthusiastic to reach as broad a range of potential e-Scientists
as possible. This activity will attract international visitors, who will in turn stimulate this research further.
We have local discussion groups on aspects of e-Science:
• Astronomical data mining
• Bioinformatics data curation
These groups enable researchers to share their knowledge of the state of the art, and provide
forums to suggest new ideas to take the subject forwards.
In the forthcoming year, we intend to deepen our international links to strengthen our research
capability. We already have a visit scheduled from Jim Gray of Microsoft Research in San Francisco. We
will also submit proposals to the EU’s ‘Framework 6’ programme. NeSC will continue to contribute to
international conferences and collaborations. Ultimately and fundamentally, we aim to forge international
links by producing world-class research.
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e-Science Institute Report
Overview
The original vision of the e-Science Institute was
Event Statistics: August 2001–July 2002
that it would host six two-week events a year.
4000
Reality has proven quite different as the graph here
shows. So great has been the demand in the UK
community for NeSC to host meetings, courses and
workshops that eSI has held 49 events in its first
year. Our doors were opened to more than 2600
8
Delegates
Delegate Days
Events
3500
7
3000
6
2500
5
2000
4
1500
3
1000
2
500
1
participants from over 500 organisations who
arrived to hear 236 speakers on every topic relating
to the development of e-Science, including software
tutorials, applications, projects, infrastructure,
research and international collaborations.
eSI started running events within weeks of the
award being announced in August 2001 and before
it had even taken occupancy of the refurbished
church in South College Street, which has been
0
Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan
Feb Mar April May June July
contributed to the project by the University of
Edinburgh. October 2001 saw Steve Tuecke, who has since become a regular visitor to eSI, give his first
Globus tutorial. At this point the conferences were managed manually while work was proceeding in
parallel to develop an on line registration system, without which the small team at eSI could not possibly
handle the volume of visitors it does. This system first went live for the AstroGRID workshop in
December and has continued to develop as the needs have expanded.
Steve Tuecke returned with Bill Allcock and Charles Bacon in January 2002 to give the Globus
expanded tutorial. This was enormously popular and heavily oversubscribed with all parallel sessions full,
and much creative thought needed to fit as many people into the meeting space as possible. In February,
the building was refurbished with additional sockets and power points in all meeting rooms, improved
networking and the construction of a second Access Grid node with the NeSC team finally moving into
the building in March 2002. The first event to be held after the move was the BlueGene meeting in
conjunction with IBM, so ensuring that the building was ready in time was paramount.
April was the month for the Official Opening of NeSC by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown. This was a
high profile event for eSI, with much media attention and at which it could not afford to fail. Many
people and organisations in the UK e-Science community contributed to the success of the day, ensuring
that the demonstrators and AccessGrid were operating at peak performance, and that the talks and
general events went smoothly.
The ‘grand finale’ for the first year was GGF5/HPDC11. These two meetings were hosted jointly for
the first time outside of the USA and attracted some 900 delegates, as well as six co-located meetings
and events. The whole event was universally agreed to be a great success. The e-Science Institute has
‘settled down’ to running four types of events – research, community building, and training as well as
hosting international collaboration meetings. It currently hosts an average of five meetings a month,
with an even busier schedule planned for autumn 2002.
South College Street
reception area.
0
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Malcolm Atkinson, the
Rt Hon Gordon Brown
and Sir Stewart
Sutherland at the
Opening of the National
e-Science Centre.
Events
Because these are part of the core business of eSI, the events in the first year are exhaustively summarised
in Appendix 1. Further details and presentations for the majority of the talks can be found on the eSI
website at: www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/. In this section we focus on three of the major meetings for the year.
Focus on
The Official Opening (25 April 2002)
The Rt Hon Gordon Brown Chancellor of the Exchequer, officially opened the National e-Science Centre
(NeSC) in April, proclaiming it a "clear demonstration of the Government’s commitment to science and
research, which includes specific funding for genomics, basic technologies and e-Science".
Gordon Brown said: “The Government is committed to maintaining the UK’s leading role in this
important area of scientific research, for which we already have an enviable reputation. I am pleased to
open the NeSC, a bold, exciting and worthwhile initiative which provides the e-Science community with
a permanent home where it can share resources, ideas and facilities.”
The official opening of the Centre brought together participants from government, academia,
Research Councils and industry. This event was more than the opening of the Centre. It also acted as
a showcase for the UK e-Science programme and was an opportunity to present its vision for the future
to Government and other decision makers. This was achieved by a unified effort from the UK e-Science
community that pulled together researchers from all the Centres. It was the first time that all of the
demonstrators had been presented together in this way.
More than 180 visitors heard speakers
addressing the major issues facing the e-Science community. In the morning they listened to talks on
AstroGrid (Dr Nicholas Walton), ‘Grid-based on-line aeroengine diagnostics’ (Professor Jim Austin) and
UNICORE (Dr Dietmer Erwin). The longer afternoon session included talks on the European Particle
Physics Grid (Mr David Williams), myGrid (Professor Carole Goble), ‘e-Science, e-Commerce and eBusiness”(Mr David Pearson), Databases (Professor Peter Buneman), ‘IBM and e-Science’ (Mr Freddie
Moran) and finally ‘Computer Science Challenges to emerge from e-Science’ (Professor Tom Rodden).
Running in parallel to the talks was a display of pilot projects in action demonstrating how Grid
computing can solve the challenges in e-Science. In a wide collaborative effort, these were from across
the UK and presented the work being done at all the e-Science centres, as well as universities, hospitals
and research laboratories. The demonstrators on display included:
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e-Science Institute Report
page 19
3D OPT Microscopy Grid - Bringing the Grid to the Biomedical Workbench
A Dynamic Brain Atlas
A Liquid Crystal Structure Modelling and Visualisation Web Portal
AstroGrid: Creating the UK's Virtual Observatory and Defining the EU's Astrophysical Virtual Observatory
Building the Grid for BaBar
ClimatePrediction.com: Public Participation in Climate Simulation of the 21st Century
Collaborative Data Visualisation of Medical Images via the Grid
Data Portal: Generic Distributed Database Queries
Dynamic GRID Optimisation
e-Science Grid Site Monitor
e-STAR: e-Science Telescopes for Astronomical Research
Exploiting the Grid to Simulate and Design the LHCB experiment.
Exploring Chemical Structures
GEODISE: Grid Enabled Optimisation and Design for Engineering
GODIVA: Grid foe Ocean Diagnostics, Interactive Visualisation and Analysis
GRAB: Grid and Biodiversity
Grid-based Collaborative Visualisation & Computational Steering
HPCGrid Services Portal
Simulating Radiation Damage to Crystalline waste-storage materials
Telemedicine on the Grid
Access Grid presentations were scheduled throughout the day and included ‘Databases & the Grid’
(Professor Norman Paton), ‘e-Science, the Grid and Southampton University’ (Professor Andrew Keane),
‘Telemedicine on the Grid’ (Dr Martin Graves and Miss Kate Caldwell), RePhoNet (Dr Thomas Eickermann)
and ICENI (Dr Steven Newhouse).
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (Principal, The University of Edinburgh) pronounced the welcome to
the formal opening later in the afternoon. He was followed by Professor Tony Hey speaking on UK e-Science,
Mr Roger McClure (SHEFC) on the launch of the eDIKT project and Professor Malcolm Atkinson spoke
about NeSC. Gordon Brown then formally opened the Centre with the response being given by Professor
Robin Leake (Vice Principal, University of Glasgow). After the formal opening, Gordon Brown proceeded
to the exhibition area to view some of the demonstrators and talk to the scientists involved. As a finale,
From top left:
The Rt Hon Gordon
Brown and Tony Hey,
Director of the e-Science
Core Programme, during
an Access Grid session;
Robin Leake, Vice
Principal of the
University of Glasgow at
the Opening;
Andrea Grainger of NeSC
badges a delegate;
Ray Browne of the DTI
and Anne Trefethen,
Associate Director of the
e-Science Core
Programme.
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he was able to speak live over AccessGrid to David Wallace at Imperial College and Director Fran Berman
at the San Diego Supercomputer Centre.
Media attention was high with over sixty items of coverage appearing in the press and online
media, including articles in the Financial Times, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, The Guardian
and BBC Online, thus helping to raise the profile of e-Science in the UK. NeSC would like to formally
extend its thanks to all of those involved, and too numerous to list here, in what was widely regarded
as a very successful Opening.
Blue Gene Meeting (15–16 March 2002)
About 100 participants converged on Edinburgh in March 2002 for the second Blue Gene Workshop, held
in the new e-Science Centre under the auspices of IBM and NeSC. ‘Blue Gene’ is the name given by IBM
to its latest and largest supercomputer being built for use in postgenomic research and this workshop
brought together distinguished scientists whose research is in the area of protein folding to help
stimulate interactions among the various communities involved. Generally, the workshop addressed the
application of massively parallel computation to the biomolecular sciences. In three sections, overviews
and recent results were combined with speculation and novel approaches to the basic question: given
unlimited computing resource, what biology would you like to do? The section on protein folding
included both experimental data on proteins folding from Alan Fersht (Cambridge, UK) as well as the
computational approaches to how proteins are able to achieve their unique 3-D structures given only an
amino acid sequence. Computational approaches to individual enzyme reactions and structure-based
drug design were linked through the need to consider molecular interactions between protein molecule
and ligand. Both quantum mechanical and semi-empirical methods were discussed. Finally, systems
biology provided a fascinating glimpse of what can be achieved when metabolic pathways, whole cells
(M Tomita, Keio) and even whole organs (Denis Noble, Oxford) are modelled. It was clear that although
great strides are being made towards successful modelling of biological processes, there remains
enormous scope for both basic biochemistry and ingenious algorithms.
GGF5/HPDC11 (21–26 July 2002)
The Fifth Global Grid Forum and Eleventh IEEE High Performance Distributed Computing Symposium
were hosted in Edinburgh by NeSC at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. This was the first
time that these two events had been run as a joint activity, and the first occasion on which HPDC had
been held outside the USA. It remains the largest event for each of these series and was the first
occasion on which GGF had connected with external participants by Access Grid and had made extensive
use of wireless networks. The UK e-Science programme and the NeSC and EPCC staff made substantial
investments of funds and labour to deliver a very successful conference. The main function of GGF5,
Delegates using the
Wireless LAN at GGF5
was, as always, the development of Grid standards and the dissemination of information about progress
in developing and using Grid technology.
The conference was opened by Dr John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils, Office of
Science and Technology, who presented an inspiring vision of the potential of e-Science and
characterised the considerable technical and social challenges and opportunities it presented. Professor
Tony Hey, Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme, reported on the rapidly growing set of UK eScience projects that are driving the UK’s Grid requirements and of the engineering work underway to
support them. The invited lecture by Dr Henry Thompson, of the University of Edinburgh (editor of the
XML schema proposal) used intriguing examples of past knowledge representation failures to expose the
challenges that attempting to build a semantic Grid would pose. This was timely as the first meeting of
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e-Science Institute Report
the community establishing a Semantic Grid research Grid GGF research group, was held at this meeting
and a tutorial on ontology was very well attended. Both of these were led by UK researchers, Professors
Carole Goble of Manchester University and David De Roure of Southampton University. The DAIS
Working Group held its first meetings, undertaking a major task of proposing a specification for data
access and integration using grids, led by Professor Norman Paton and Dr Dave Pearson. Dr Rick Stevens
of ANL gave an exciting introduction to biogrids and Dr Fran Berman of SDSC reported early work on the
construction of the Distributed TeraScale Facility.
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From top left:
John Taylor, Director
General of Research
Councils, Office of
Science and Technology,
at GGF5;
GGF5 at the Edinburgh
International
Conference Centre.
Opening HPDC11, Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM spoke of their strong commitment to Grid
technology, initially for computing on demand, and of the major investment IBM planned in order to
develop and deploy it. The busy programme of research papers at HPDC11 was combined with several
provocative keynotes. Professor Jon Crowcroft of Cambridge University explored the new challenges
that Grid computing presents to network providers and encouraged the Grid community to learn much
more about the intrinsic properties of networks. In a complementary talk, Professor Joe Sventek of
Agilent, now at Glasgow University, spoke of the Grid-scale challenge of monitoring and diagnosing the
behaviour of toady’s global digital networks.
Professor Tom Rodden of Nottingham University
1000
and Director of the Equator IRC described the
900
technical, ethical and social challenges of
ubiquitous computing. His examples were drawn
800
from plans to equip people at risk of cardiovascular
700
engaged in their daily business in Glasgow and
researchers in Antartica as they collected
paleoclimatic data. Dr Gregory Abowd of Georgia
Participants
episodes with personal health monitors as they
600
500
400
Institute of Technology raised similar examples of
new kinds of Grid-like distributed computing
300
infrastructure, in his case to support ubiquitous
200
computing in the home.
100
Some associated events were held in the
e-Science Institute and we drew on our dual
0
GGF1
GGF2
GGF3
GGF4
GGF5
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e-Science Report
university foundation to hold the two day Grid Applications workshop in Glasgow to find sufficient capacity.
This very energetic workshop was led by Professor Simon Cox of Southampton University. Taken together
the ten-day programme made it self-evident that as a result of the UK e-Science Programme, the UK is
a major contributor to Grid computing and high-performance distributed computing.
Visitors to eSI
David Maier (Oregon Health & Science University, USA, 25 June 2002–3 July 2002)
Dave Maier visited for a little over a week to work with Malcolm Atkinson and Peter Buneman. This was
based on prior working relationships concerning scientific and object-oriented databases, in which Dave
Maier is an leading expert. This led to fruitful discussions on how to efficiently handle matrix structured
and XML structured data. We also explored issues of provenance tracking, annotation and archiving
such data. This was all planned, based on previous discussions and we intend that this collaborative
work will continue. A surprise was Dave Maier’s project modelling the interaction between the outflow
of water from the Columbia River and the Pacific. This involved scheduling major data production
workflows with simulation and sensor array inputs on a daily basis. This proved a provocative example
of data intensive computation issues.
Professor Gregory A. Riccardi (Florida State University, current visitor)
Greg Riccardi arrived at NeSC on June 28, 2002 for a visit of four months. He is on sabbatical from his
position as Professor of Computer Science at Florida State University and has come to Edinburgh to
participate in the development of methods of utilizing information and data in ways that are consistent
across all Grid applications. The OGSA-DAI project at NeSC is a perfect match for his interests and skills.
Plans
Training events
As a result of the demand for training courses and the cost of hiring equipment to run them, we have
decided to set up a training room in the Swanston meeting room at South College Street. This will house
twenty PCs configurable with a variety of Windows or Linux operating system builds. The use of Ghost
to install images to all machines concurrently will significantly reduce management overhead, and will
provide speedy and flexible reconfigurations of the system build. It is anticipated that the provision of
the training room will significantly increase the number of workshops that eSI is able to provide and host.
Student Program
As part of its outreach and training mission, eSI will implement a Summer Scholarship programme for
senior undergraduates pursuing an appropriate qualification.
e-Science Report
Projects
Projects
One of the main goals of NeSC (as for the regional e-Science centres) is to develop and manage a wide
portfolio of collaborative projects with industry focused on developing middleware and application
solutions in the e-Science arena. In the first instance, funding for these projects has come from the
DTI/EPSRC Grid Core Programme. A grant of £3 million over three years has been made available to NeSC
for this purpose.
The NeSC Grid Core Programme (GCP) funding is designed to fund collaborative projects with
industrial and commercial partners to develop open core Grid middleware for the benefit of the project
partners and the wider e-Science community. The GCP funding from DTI/EPSRC pays the full costs of the
NeSC partners involved matched by ‘in-kind’ contributions from the project’s industrial and commercial
partners. In-kind can be anything from cash, to equipment, to software licenses, to company effort.
We also report on eDIKT, which is fully funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council.
OGSA/DAI
Background
OGSA-DAI is a UK-wide project collaboration between NeSC, eScience North West at the University of
Manchester, North East Regional eScience Centre at the University of Newcastle, IBM and Oracle. This
project will deliver a kit of components for accessing and integrating data from diverse and distributed
data bases using the new Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). It builds on the early dialogue with
the OGSA team at Argonne National Laboratory, the Information Systems Institute in the University of
Southern California and IBM, and it derives from the requirements analysis conducted by the UK
Database Task Force.
OGSA-DAI is developing designs, demonstrators, prototypes and ultimately reference
implementations of OGSA data access and integration services, along with crucial OGSA extensions to
support e-Science. The basic services developed by OGSA-DAI will be released as part of the OGSA-based
Globus Toolkit version 3.
The overall project is divided into six work packages:
1. Programme Management: led by Oracle Corporation.
2. Architectural Specification: led by EPCC/NeSC.
3. Grid XML and Semi-Structured Data Services: led by EPCC.
4. Distributed Query Processing: led by eScience North West and the North-East Region
e-Science Centre.
5. Grid eScience Services and BinX: led by EPCC.
6. Grid RDBMS and Globus-2 Data Services: led by IBM UK.
Goals
The project is concerned with middleware to assist with access and integration of data from separate
data sources via the Grid. It is engaged in identifying the requirements, designing solutions and
delivering software that will meet this purpose. The project was conceived by the UK Database Task Force
and is working closely with the Global Grid Forum DAIS-WG and the Globus team.
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Projects
e-Science Report
Members
Rob Baxter, EPCC
Brian Collins, IBM UK
Inderpal Narang, IBM USA
Paul Watson, NEeSC
Malcolm Atkinson, NeSC
Norman Paton, NWeSC
Dave Pearson, Oracle UK
Status
Phase 1 of the project, which started in February 2002, is concerned with using prototyping techniques
to refine functional scope and to develop a common architectural framework for Grid data services.
Phase 2, which is scheduled to start at the beginning of October 2002, will focus on implementing Grid
data services that provide access and integration to data held in Relational Database Management
systems and XML repositories. The software deliverables will be made available to the UK e-Science
community and will also provide the basis of standards recommendations on Grid data services that are
put forward to the Global Grid Forum through the DAIS working group.
Sun Data and Compute Grids (SunDCG)
Background
SunDCG is a collaboration between NeSC and Sun Microsystems, using Grid Engine and Globus to
schedule jobs across a combination of local and remote machines. The Sun Grid Engine is a resource
management tool which allows the efficient use of compute resources within an organisation. However,
there is some desirable Grid functionality that SGE does not yet provide. Sun classifies Grids at three
different levels:
Cluster Grid:
a single team or project and their associated resources.
Enterprise Grid:
multiple teams and projects but within a single organisation, facilitating
collaboration of resources across the enterprise.
Global Grid:
linked Enterprise and Cluster Grids, providing collaboration among organisations.
Grid Engine meets the first two levels by allowing a user to transparently make use of any number
of compute resources within an organisation. However, Grid Engine alone does not yet meet the third
level. The project will develop a data and compute Grid consisting of Grid Engines linked via a
Hierarchical Scheduler. To the user this Hierarchical Scheduler will offer similar functionality and
appearance to a Grid Engine but will enable access to resources not necessarily within the organisation.
It is perceived that as well as communicating with Grid Engines the Hierarchical Scheduler will be able
to communicate with other Hierarchical Schedulers to further enhance scalability. A prime focus of the
project is the application of good software engineering techniques and the use of industry standard
analysis and design tools. To ensure the project stays relevant there are ongoing consultations with
existing Grid Engine users in industry, commerce and academia. These consultations are being used for
requirements capture to drive the design process and ensure that functionality is desired and useful.
e-Science Report
Projects
Goals
The project aim is to provide users with coherent and co-ordinated access to compute and data resources
both within and across organisations. This will be achieved by developing a Hierarchical Scheduler which
will allow jobs and their associated data to be passed on to a Sun Grid Engine. A middleware layer will
handle the communications and data transfer between the Hierarchical Scheduler and the Grid
Engine(s), Globus being a key technology in this area. This will enable the user to have access to a wider
range of resources and should improve efficiency for the user and the Grid Engine administrator. The
Hierarchical Scheduler will be scalable and allow access to resources not only at the local and
organisational level, but also to multi-organisational and international levels.
Members
Paul Graham, EPCC
Geoff Cawood, EPCC
Thomas Seed, EPCC
Ali Anjomshoaa, EPCC
Terry Sloan, EPCC
Status
A prototype based around Grid Engine V5.3 and the Globus Toolkit V2.0 is currently under development.
This will enable exploration of the issues involved in utilising remote resources. This prototype will use
Grid Engine execution methods to interact with the remote resources. The relevant modules of the
Globus Toolkit V2.0 will be used to investigate security and data transfer issues. The final goal of the
project is to use OGSA-compliant Globus Toolkit V3.0 to interact with remote resources. To this end, the
design of the Hierarchical Scheduler is currently considering a development path which involves an
initial implementation based around Web services followed by a migration to Grid services.
GridWeaver
Background
GridWeaver is a proposed collaboration with HP Laboratories in Bristol, exploring automated
configuration and management for Next Generation Grid computing fabrics. As the world deploys larger
and more diverse computational resources as components of computing Grids, there is an emerging need
to be able to configure these resources:
• correctly to avoid errors in complex resource configurations
• flexibly so that resources can be rapidly reconfigured for different purposes
• automatically to reduce the labour-intensiveness of resource configuration and management,
and to speed it up.
Meeting this need has not been a focus of Grid research to date, but we believe it is a vital issue
to address as Grid technologies become more widely deployed. The project will start in August 2002. It
brings together researchers with a long-standing interest in the problems of correctly and automatically
configuring and managing large, complex assemblies of resources, and the applications and services that
run on them.
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Projects
e-Science Report
Goals
In addition to developing configuration solutions for current Grid infrastructures, GridWeaver aims to
anticipate the needs of ‘next-generation’ computing fabrics. We believe that next-generation fabrics will
be characterised by increasing scale, diversity, complexity and dynamism. Furthermore, as Grid computing
becomes used for commercial as well as scientific applications, security becomes a higher priority.
Imagine a next-generation Grid fabric that includes elements from specialised supercomputers to
commodity clusters, with a wide variety of heterogeneous hardware and software, including dedicated
resources as well as spare cycles on non-dedicated resources, with permanently connected systems, and
intermittently connected systems, and so on. This will give you an idea of the diversity and complexity
that must be configured and managed.
The UK e-Science Core programme project ID for the GridWeaver project is ‘HPFabMan’.
Members
Paul Anderson, Carwyn Edwards, Lex Holt (School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh),
George Beckett, Kostas Kavoussanakis (EPCC),
Guillaume Mecheneau, Patrick Goldsack, Peter Toft (HP Labs Bristol).
eDIKT
Background
eDIKT – e-Science Data, Information and Knowledge Transformation – is an initiative at the National
e-Science Centre to construct novel data management and interpretation software tools, tools which
will underpin the seamless linking, management and interpretation of the vast amounts of data available
on global networks. eDIKT will enable e-Scientists to harvest the knowledge hidden in the acres of data
with which leading researchers work.
eDIKT has been funded through a Research Development Grant by the Scottish Higher Education
Funding Council – the largest such grant ever awarded by SHEFC. Fully funded for three years, it is
hoped and anticipated that eDIKT will be extended for a further three years, during which central
funding will tail off to be replaced by additional funding streams from academia and industry.
Roger McClure of SHEFC
at the unveiling of the
eDIKT project, NeSC
Opening, April 2002.
Goals
eDIKT is largely a software development project, but software development at the extremes of the IT
world. eDIKT will apply solid software engineering techniques to leading-edge computer science research
to produce robust, scalable data management tools that will enable new research areas in e-Science.
eDIKT will initially investigate the use of new database techniques in astronomy, bioinformatics,
particle physics and in creating virtual global organisations using the new Open Grid Services
Architecture.
eDIKT’s realm of enquiry will be at the Grid scale, the terabyte regime of data
management, its goal to strain-test the computer science theories and techniques at this scale.
Working over time with a wider range of scientific areas, it is anticipated that eDIKT will develop
generic spin-off technologies that may have commercial applications in Scotland and beyond in areas
such as drug discovery, financial analysis and agricultural development. For this reason, a key component
of the eDIKT team will be a dedicated commercialisation manager who will push out the benefits of
eDIKT to industry and business.
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Projects
Members
By the end of November 2002 eDIKT expects to be at its full strength of eight full-time Software
Engineers, a Project Architect, a Project Manager and a Business Development Manager, with additional
administrative and systems support staff. At time of writing, the team are:
Dr Rob Baxter – Project Manager;
Dr Davy Virdee, Dr Stephen Rutherford, Bob Gibbins, Robert Carroll and Ted Wen
– Software Engineers;
Charles Gadalla – Business Development Manager.
Status
After an initial phase of e-Science requirements definition and computer science technology evaluation,
eDIKT will begin its first testbed activities, including:
• enabling interoperability and interchange of binary and XML data in astronomy – tools to
provide ‘implicit XML’ representation of pre-existing binary files;
• enabling relational joins across terabyte-sized database tables;
• testing new data replication tools for particle physics;
• engineering industrial-strength tools for indexing the human genome;
• building a data integration testbed using the Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and
Integration components being developed as part of the UK’s core e-Science programme and the
Globus-3 Toolkit.
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Manager’s Report
e-Science Report
Manager’s Report
Staff
As a result of the rapid growth in eSI activity, the number of staff directly associated with supporting
events has expanded from what was originally envisioned. The newness of the staff and the number of
events (described in a recent job advertisement as ‘many in-house opportunities for team building’) has
resulted in a strong team spirit. Staff commitment to delivering is exemplary, and they regularly perform
beyond what could be reasonably expected of them. We propose to appoint a Receptionist to sit
permanently at the front desk in support the ever-expanding activity of eSI.
Ms Susan Andrews
Susan Andrews joined NeSC in September 2001 and is based in the Department of Computing Science
at the University of Glasgow. Her responsibilities include the design, implementation and maintenance
of the NeSC database and website. Much of the website is generated using an SQLServer database and
a combination of HTML and Cold Fusion, thus providing an up-to-date website which serves as a
supportive tool to the e-Science community. A successful online registration system which plays a key
role in the organisation of events is now established. She has collated e-Science project information to
provide a full and informative listing of e-Science projects and provide a means for Principle
Investigators to update their project information.
Professor Malcolm Atkinson
Malcolm Atkinson is the Director of the National e-Science Centre. He joined the effort to locate the
centre in Scotland from his post in Computing Science in Glasgow, where he had led the development
of Department. He has committed his research career to addressing the challenges of building very large
computing systems that are well engineered, affordable and meet a real need. Early examples were in
computer aided design, then health care. His most recent work was with SUN on large-scale persistent
versions of Java. These large-scale system challenges abound in e-Science, so he was delighted to
engage with the UK and international communities in addressing them. This included his role in the UK
Database Task Force, chairing the UK Architectural Task Force, engaging in international meetings and
taking an active role in the design of the new Grid architecture, Open Grid Services. The development
of NeSC has required leadership, in building the team, setting directions, establishing collaborative
relationships within the two universities, throughout the UK and internationally. The opportunity to
steer the e-Science Institute’s programme is an exciting privilege, as the resources permit us to bring
together the energetic teams that are building e-Science Infrastructure and the innovative pioneers who
are determined to discover its potential in all subjects. Though he is sorry to leave his colleagues,
research team and nine PhD students behind — the directorship demands full-time attention — he is
delighted to take a leading role in a national effort to demonstrate what can be achieved when
theoreticians, computer scientists and experimentalists work well together to build systems to tackle our
most intriguing problems.
Professor Muffy Calder
As the effort invested in establishing the e-Science Institute and an international presence, took the
Director, Malcolm Atkinson away from Glasgow University it was essential that e-Science leadership was
provided in Glasgow. Professor Muffy Calder stepped into this role. For more than a year, she has led
the team, recruiting them and directing their efforts.
She developed a dialogue with several
e-Science Report
Manager’s Report
telecommunications companies on the analysis of large-scale distributed systems behaviour necessary
for dependable Grids, which we had hoped to investigate as Centre projects. Two strands of her work
were engaging computing science researchers to address fundamental issues thrown up by e-Science
and engaging researchers from other disciplines to explore the potential of e-Science. This culminated
in a DTI funded project on modelling proteomic processes using the process models developed in her
previous research with the communications industry.
This also led to significant investment in
bioinformatics.
Mr Mark Cavanagh
Mark Cavanagh started work at the e-Science Institute in January 2002 and, since then, has done most
of the technical organisation of the NeSC-sponsored events here. With the recruitment of a technical
events co-ordinator freeing him from this increasingly onerous task (which was originally envisaged as
requiring a small fraction of his time), it is intended that Mark concentrate on Systems and Database
Administration.
Mr James Duffy
James Duffy joined NeSC at the end of January 2002, beginning as Conference Assistant which involved
assisting the Conference Manager in all aspects of conference organisation, such as: booking hotels,
arranging travel, arranging the equipment for the conferences, liaising with conference counterparts in
other institutions, organising the food and literature for the events. He moved into finance for the NeSC
in May, processing invoices and expenses claims and looking after the GridNet finances.
Ms Andrea Grainger
Andrea Grainger joined NeSC in October 2001 as Conference Administrator, and had a busy conference
schedule from the beginning. As NeSC expanded and hired more staff, her role evolved into her present
role of Conference Manager.
She is also Secretary to the EPCC/NeSC Directorate and Senior
Administrator for a team of four clerical staff. As Conference Manager, she liaises with conference
organisers, technical staff, local hotels and restaurants, and University staff to ensure that the vision of
the conference organiser is carried out. She has also managed several large projects, such as the move
into the South College Street building, the NeSC Grand Opening in April, and GGF5/HPDC11 in July. In
particular, GGF5/HPDC11 involved hosting 1000 guests, coordinating with organisers in the US, and
managing 15 co-located meetings in two cities during the conference week.
Dr Anna Kenway
Anna Kenway is one of the founding members of NeSC. In her role as Physics School Administrator at
the time, she was one of the people who was involved in putting the proposal together. Her experience
as a senior administrator in the University allowed the project to start immediately on announcement,
as she was able to call on resources that a new appointee would not. The role of Manager is wide
ranging. As well as building the team at NeSC, and being responsible for the usual administrative tasks
such as financial and personnel management, Anna has had the pleasurable task of deciding on the
layout and use of the South College Street building, and on the sort of IT services that eSI would provide
for visitors. She has a strong commitment to a ‘can do’ approach where the needs of the user are
paramount. With a background in particle physics and databases, Anna has also taken on nonadministrative responsibilities. She is the project manager for the NeSC website which is database
driven, and has become responsible for projects involving postgraduate students, and in particular the
PPARC Summer School. Anna is delighted that she will be moving full-time to NeSC at the beginning
of calendar year 2003.
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Mr Alastair Knowles
Alastair Knowles joined NeSC as the Director's Personal Assistant in July 2002. He coordinates all of the
Director's administrative requirements, and assists peripherally in the administration of NeSC events and
conferences. He also helps out with the arrangements for visiting academics
Ms Lee McLeod
Lee McLeod started with the National e-Science Centre in July 2002 as a Conference Assistant.
Currently, she assists the Conference Manager to organise all conferences which are mainly held at the
National e-Science Centre. This ranges from the arrangement of rooms, catering, accommodation, and
materials, to ‘on the day’ requests, and follow-up afterwards.
Mr Stewart Macneill
Following periods of research work and systems support in the University of Glasgow's Department of
Computing Science, Stewart Macneill was appointed as Systems Manager for the Glasgow side of NeSC's
operations. The past year has seen the successful installation of the Glasgow Access Grid node and the
advancement of the Grid’s capabilities. It is his job to keep this equipment running smoothly. In addition,
Glasgow also currently hosts the NeSC web site so it is important to maintain the server, middleware
and underlying database to keep our web site visible.
Mr David McNicol
David McNicol joined NeSC as a Systems Administrator, in January 2002, from a similar position in
Strathclyde University. He has been responsible for setting up the network, computing infrastructure and
services within the e-Science Institute. He has also designed and implemented a web-based registration
system which secures our visitors network and wireless LAN. During the summer of 2002 he had a
hands-on role setting up and running a wireless network for the GGF5 conference, held in the Edinburgh
International Conference Centre, which was used by over four hundred delegates. In the coming months
he will be working on networking, security, developing an infrastructure for eDIKT and OGSA-DAI, and
continuing to support and enhance the NeSC infrastructure.
Dr Mark Parsons
Mark Parsons is the National e-Science Centre’s Commercial Director. As EPCC’s Commercial Manager,
he was closely involved in the preparation of the successful NeSC bid last year and assumed the
additional role of NeSC Commercial Director from its inauguration. In this role he has been central to
the development of NeSC’s GCP funded project proposals working closely with all of the NeSC partner
institutes. Three of these proposals have been funded to date – OGSA-DAI, HPFabMan and SunDCG. He
has worked to establish a best practice legal framework for these projects in order to establish
collaboration agreements and reporting procedures. He has also the experience to advise a number of
the Regional e-Science Centres on their projects and contractual issues when such support has been
requested. In addition to his formal business development and contractual role he has taken a lead role
in Europe, leading the work of the GRIDSTART project and ensuring the successes of the UK Grid Core
Programme have visibility in a European context. His most rewarding endeavour this year was the
success of the Global Grid Forum 5 conference, which he took a lead role in organising and running.
Mr Terry Rodgers
Terry Rodgers started working as a temp at NeSC in May 2002, before being hired as the eDIKT
Administrator in June. His task is to deal with the paperwork for the team, and also helps out with other
events at the Centre as well as reception duties. He is the secretary of the building’s Management
e-Science Report
Manager’s Report
Committee and is also responsible for compiling the information for this first Annual Report. Since
arriving, he has assisted with various conferences, including the N+N Collaboration with China and GGF5.
Mr John Watt
John Watt joined NeSC in mid-June 2002 as a research programmer in the Department of Computing
Science. His responsibilities involve the implementation, maintenance and support of the Globus Grid
software, and the design of NeSC projects using this toolkit.
Finance
Core Funding (DTI)
The table overleaf shows the current state of core funding for NeSC, by Infrastructure, Access Grid and
eSI as well as GCPs applied for and awarded.
GridNet (EPSRC)
‘To provide support for UK Grid developers and researchers to enable them to participate in
international standardisation and coordination bodies such as GGF, W3C and IETF.’
Applications to GridNet are reviewed by three members of the GridNet Advisory Board (GNAB) comprising:
Professor Malcolm Atkinson
Professor Jon Crowcroft
Professor John Darlington
Professor David Hutchison
Professor Andy Keane
Dr Andy Parker
Professor Ron Perrott
GridNet is intended to provide funding on a continuing basis over an extended period of time, and
not for individual events, though an exception was made in the case of GGF4 because the announcement
of the award was made so close to the event. It has a total value of £ 595k over three years commencing
February 2002.
Application for GridNet funding is web based and we are in the process of implementing a secure
Web area to allow PI’s to manage their accounts. It was agreed with EPSRC that NeSC would not handle
all expenses claims (not least because most universities now refund their own staff using BACS and this
would introduce unnecessary delays), and that institutions with an allocation should set up a suspense
account and claim from NeSC on a regular basis.
page 31
N/A
IBM
Oracle
Other Academic
Industry Collaborator 1
Industry Collaborator 2
N/A
Hewlett Packard
Other Academic
Industry Collaborator 1
NeSC
N/A
Sun Microsystems
Other Academic
Industry Collaborator 1
£450,000
£0
£437,500
£143,170
£0
£132,000
£322,000
£1,804,000
£0
£1,035,000
£2,512,197
£54,495
£0
£0
£437,500
£0
£0
£132,000
£135,586
£145,692
£0
£1,035,000
£2,512,197
£54,495
£1,500,000
£117,500
£840,202
Grant
£450,000
£0
£0
£143,170
£0
£0
£161,000
£1,631,000
£0
£0
£0
£0
£0
£0
£0
Industry
Contribution
01/08/2002
01/08/2002
01/04/2002
01/04/2002
01/02/2002
01/08/2001
01/08/2001
01/08/2001
01/08/2001
Start Date
24
24
12
12
18
18
18
36
36
36
36
Period
of Grant
N/A
05/08/2002
N/A
24/06/2002
Not known
Not known
13/06/2002
07/12/2001
01/10/2001
01/10/2001
01/10/2001
Date Offer
N/A
30/08/2002
N/A
30/08/2002
Not known
Not known
30/08/2002
20/12/2001
01/10/2001
01/10/2001
01/10/2001
Date
Accepted
4
3
2
1
Ammendment
No.
Manager’s Report
Centre
SunDCG
NeSC
Centre
HPFabMan (Gridweaver)
NeSC
Total Core Funding
Additional
Centre
OGSA-DAI
£117,500
Access Grid
£1,500,000
£840,202
Infrastructure
eSI
Total
Proposal
Name
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Manager’s Report
Applications & Allocations as at 31 July 2002
GGF4
Various
£16,872
Mr Jonathan Giddy
Cardiff
£1,000
Dr Omer F Rana
Cardiff
£1,000
Dr Peter Clarke
UC London
£1,000
Professor Ken W Brodlie
Leeds
£1,000
Dr Steven Newhouse
Imperial
£30,000
Dr Richard Hughes-Jones
Manchester
£20,200
Professor Ron Perrott
Queens, Belfast
£30,000
Dr Robert Baxter
Edinburgh
£30,000
Dr Roger Philp
Cardiff
£1,000
Professor Simon Cox
Southampton
£1,500
Total
£133,572
Additional Funding attracted by NeSC
NeSC has attracted an additional £8M of funding from:
• the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council
• from IBM in the form of the secondment of Andy Knox and the planned SUR machine as well
as other hardware
• from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the form of accommodation and staff posts.
This is detailed below.
University of Edinburgh
eSI Building (three years at £350k per year)
Comms infrastructure (SRIF)
Two posts for e-Science Computing
College e-Science Initiative
Refurbishment of eSI & Expansion into Old College
£k
1050
1680
200
200
60
Subtotal £3190 k
University of Glasgow
e-Science Hub - Kelvin Building
Refurbishment of BioIniformatics Centre - Feb 03
e-Science Posts for Bioinformatics Centre (£160k each year)
support of PhD students for Bioinformatics Centre
other e-science posts (£65k for two years)
490
300
480
50
130
Subtotal £1450 k
IBM
Blue Dwarf SUR Machine
700
Secondment of Dr Andy Knox, £100k for 2.5 years
250
Loan of IBM servers to University of Glasgow, £4437/quarter, start Feb 2001
62
Loan of IBM servers to NeSC, £3297/quarter, start Apr 2002
30
Loan of machines for NeSC Opening
5
Donation of Netfinity server to NeSC
8
Subtotal £1055 k
SHEFC
RDG eDIKT
2280
Subtotal £2280 k
Grand Total from all sources £7.98 M
(Note: Unless otherwise stated, time frame is August 2001 to August 2004)
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Buildings
South College Street
In March 2002, the National e-Science Centre moved into South College Street. The building, a sensitively
refurbished church in central Edinburgh and near to the original University buildings of Old College,
comprises the Newhaven lecture theatre seating 108, two large meeting rooms, three reception areas
and offices. To enable the Centre to act as a leading IT organisation it was necessary to undertake some
refurbishment of the building. This largely involved improving the networking in the two main meeting
rooms (Swanston and Cramond) so that visitors would be able to access networking and power for their
laptops. Additional power sockets were also installed in the Newhaven lecture theatre where possible.
The e-Science Institute prides itself on providing a ‘well connected’ and welcoming IT environment
for visitors which enables them to connect to the internet and access their email and other services with
a minimum of trouble. We are one of the first organisations in Edinburgh University to provide
WirelessLAN and David McNicol has written and implemented a Web-based WirelessLAN registration
system which allows visitors to auto register. This is particularly useful when running events with a
hundred delegates or so. Imagine trying to register them to use WirelessLAN (as justifiably required by
the University Computing Services), manually, first thing before a meeting. After a number of requests
from other Centres to use this system he has made it available at http://homepages.nesc.ac.uk/
~david/software/wlan/
We are particularly proud of ‘the Pod’ which acts as an internet café when events are on, provides
space for short term visitors and is also used as a meeting room on occasion. It even acted as a press
room for the Opening. An early decision was made to provide the two flavours of platform favoured by
different sectors of our community. To satisfy both requirements a low maintenance Sunray system was
installed for UNIX users and Windows XP machines for the others. This area is always fully occupied
during events and very popular.
The Pod has also been used for training purposes, but has very limited capacity. This limited
capacity and an increasing demand for eSI to run training courses requiring ‘hands on’ capability has led
to the decision to implement a training room in the Swanston.
Future plans also include the
refurbishment of several offices in the Old College, which is just across the road from eSI.
Glasgow
NeSC staff located in Glasgow are currently housed in the Computer Science building of the University
of Glasgow, though it is planned to site the facility in a new ‘e-Science Hub’ in the Kelvin Building.
A third AccessGrid node has been installed at Glasgow.
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Manager’s Report
page 35
The ‘Pod’ being used for
interviews during the
Opening.
IT Infrastructure
It was clear from the start that South College Street would require a sophisticated IT infrastructure. The
system would have to satisfy a number of contradictory requirements. Firstly, it would need to provide
a secure system for NeSC staff. Secondly, a more open research environment and finally an ‘open’
environment for visitors bringing their own laptops. It would also be necessary to provide the sort of
environment that overseas visitors would be accustomed to, such as WirelessLAN. Even when we
initially thought that we had finalised the requirements for the infrastructure, conditions continued to
change with the addition of extra servers such as the IBM loan machine (Gilmore).
These requirements have led to the extensive network in eSI that provides facilities for training and
visitors as well as infrastructure and support for NeSC research.
The visitors’ area (called the ‘Pod’) provides five PCs and five Sunrays that eSI visitors can use to
access e-mail and the web, or for drafting documents. The Sunrays are X-terminals connected to
Clapton, which is a Sun Blade 1000 with an UltraSPARC 3 CPU and 1024MB RAM.
The VPN is used by staff who connect to the network from outside the firewall. This includes the
wireless network, which can be used throughout the eSI building.
The two key servers for eSI infrastructure are Hendrix and Zappa. Zappa is a Sun e250, running
core services such as sendmail, DNS, Samba, printing, etc. It is also responsible for backups. Hendrix is
our Windows 2000 domain controller. It handles Windows authentication, and also runs MS Exchange.
A number of important projects are still in the pipeline:
1. Moving the public NeSC web pages and SQLServer database from Glasgow to the NeSC servers
and the secure web pages from the EPCC servers. Santana will run the database, with page
providing the Windows front end. Secure web services will run on Townsend, which is a Linux
machine running Apache.
2. Web cast (video streaming) in the Newhaven lecture theatre.
3. A further ‘portable’ AccessGrid node to enable us to broadcast from any location.
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Network diagram.
Manager’s Report
e-Science Report
e-Science Report
Appendix
Appendix
Details of Events to 31 July 2002
The e-Science Institute runs four types of events – Research, Community Building, and Training as well
as hosting International Collaboration meetings. Many events are multi-purpose, but we have tried to
classify each under one major category. We have excluded meetings of a purely managerial nature.
Further information and material for the events is available at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/.
First Grid Users Meeting (Community Building)
23rd August, 2001
This was the first event hosted by eSI. Twenty participants from the UK e-Science community, representing
twelve organisations, arrived to discuss plans and requirements for the Grid, e-Science events, and
priorities for the National e-Science Centre.
Databases and the Grid (Research)
24th August, 2001
Eleven UK participants from eight organisations met to discuss database applications on the Grid.
UK High-End Computing Symposium (Research)
10th–11th September, 2001
One hundred and forty participants attended this symposium, the first large-scale event to be held by
NeSC. UKHEC aims to investigate emerging areas of computing and to inform and provide advice to the
user community in hardware and software applications. This meeting was an opportunity to increase
awareness of who was involved with NeSC, and how the start-up was proceeding, as well as discussing
staffing, funding and network issues.
Pre-GGF3 Meeting (Community Building)
1st October, 2001
Nineteen participants met to plan ahead for the UK contributions to the third Global Grid Forum, held
in Frascati, near Rome, Italy, as well as reviewing the eSI programme.
Introduction to Grid Computing and the Globus Toolkit (Training)
12th October, 2001
Eighty participants from thirty-five organisations arrived to hear Steve Tuecke, Globus Project lead
architect from the Argonne National Laboratory, give a practical introduction both to Grid computing,
and to the Globus Toolkit.
Getting Going with the Grid (Community Building)
22nd–25th October, 2001
Thirty-five participants from nineteen organisations attended this workshop designed as a practical
introduction both to Grid computing, and to the Globus Toolkit and intended to bring together a wide
range of people engaged in the task of developing Grid infrastructure and Grid applications in the UK.
The participants were offered introductions to Globus, Condor, SRB, and Access Grid. There were
overviews of Grid portals, reports on early experiences from UK Grid projects (European Data Grid and
GridPP). Several computer companies talked about their plans and the current Grid-related work in
Europe was reviewed.
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Appendix
e-Science Report
Bioinformatics Grid Users’ Meeting (BiGUM1) (Community Building)
30th October, 2001
Fifty-five participants arrived, from twenty-six organisations, for this first meeting of the Biological Grid
Users, to help form a community among this group of e-Scientists, to assist in the dialogue between
biological Grid users and the implementers of the UK Grid infrastructure. Also identified was how the
e-Science Institute can best help this community and to identify other actions that might be commissioned
or requested. This was followed by a survey of bioinformatics requirements and a presentation of three
bioinformatics Grid applications. Participants were also asked to present their own requirements,
interests and contributions in order to identify a follow up agenda..
Quantum ChromoDynamics Grid (QCDGrid) Workshop (Research)
2nd November, 2001
Nineteen participants representing seven organisations met to discuss establishing a datagrid between
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Swansea, which had to be fully functional and robust by summer
2002, when the old centralised data store closed down. The intention was to use 0.5TB RAID disks
operating data caching/mirroring across the sites, with Edinburgh as the primary source of data (T3E
then QCDOC). UKQCD is loosely attached to the US SciDAC project which is trying to define standards
for QCD software and data. This may impose some external constraints as they evolve towards an
international QCDGrid.
The purpose of the workshop was to educate the participants about those aspects of XML and SRB
which related to their needs, plus any options for achieving similar functionality. NeSC will provide
introductory talks on XML and SRB. In addition to members of UKQCD, systems staff from the sites
concerned and non-UKQCD members of GridPP also attended for discussions of Data Markup, Data
Storage and Mirroring, User Interfaces.
Grid Particle Physics 2nd Collaboration Meeting (Research)
5th-6th November, 2001
Fifty-seven participants met, coming from eighteen organisations, to discuss various GridPP projects.
The VRVS system was used to broadcast procedures to members in other locations. After being opened
by Richard Kenway and Steve Lloyd, GridPP Project Status and LHC Computing Project Status updates
were given by Tony Doyle and Les Robertson. ‘Highlights of the meeting included Specification, Status
Report and Development Plans for Current and Future Experiments”, ‘Grid Overview Technical Status
Reports’ and ‘Middleware Interfaces and Development”.
Large Scale System Configuration Workshop (Research)
8th–9th November, 2001
For this event, eighteen participants from seven organisations were invited to this workshop for
experienced practitioners to discuss all aspects of installing and maintaining system configurations on
large numbers of nodes, including Grid farms, servers, and desktop workstations. A major aim was to
bring together people from different backgrounds to share experiences, and inform the development of
the new techniques which would be essential for the management of the very large numbers of nodes
being envisaged for the next generation of Grid systems. A summary of the discussions and conclusions
can be found at: http://homepages.informatics.ed.ac.uk/group/lssconf/config2001//
e-Science Report
Appendix
Grid Architectural Discussions (Community Building)
12th–14th December, 2001
Fourteen participants, mainly from the Architecture Task Force, representing twenty-three organisations
met at NeSC to discuss Grid Architecture with Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois.
A Database Task Force Discussion was followed by a talk by Ian Foster with comments and discussion by
the UK ATF to sketch out an Architecture for UK work. During this event, NeSC co-sponsored, with the
Division of Informatics, a public lecture in the Reid Concert Hall, by Ian Foster to the University
Community, on ‘The Anatomy of the Grid, Enabling Scalable Virtual Organisations’. A dinner was held in
the Talbot Rice Gallery on the final evening.
AstroGRID Workshop (Research)
13th–14th December, 2001
Twenty participants arrived from ten organisations gathered at NeSC for status and news reports,
reviews of actions and External Projects (such as VISTA, AVO, EGSO, NVO, COST, DBTF and GridPP).
Reports from working parties were produced, on Preliminary Architecture, workplans, budget,
recruitment and an AGLI meeting.
Scottish e-Science Forum (Community Building)
17th January, 2002
Thirty-five participants, from six organisations were welcomed to this inaugural event of the Scottish eScience Community. After being given an overview of NeSC by Malcolm Atkinson, talks were presented
on Funding Industrial Projects by Mark Parsons, and The Scottish Perspective by Stuart Anderson.
Working Groups reported on science application areas, such as e-Science in education, etc, before
planning the work of SeSF.
Grid & Globus Expanded Tutorial (Training)
21st–24th January, 2002
One hundred and fifteen participants, representing sixty-four organisations came to NeSC to hear
speakers Steve Tuecke (Globus Project lead architect), Bill Allcock and Charles Bacon (GRIDS Centre,
University of Chicago) from the Argonne National Laboratory. After the Introduction to Grid Computing
and Globus Toolkit by Steve Tuecke, the Tutorial split into two tracks for developers and administrators,
with a community-building dinner at the neighbouring Chapterhouse Restaurant afterwards.
Track 1 (Developer Tutorial, Steve Tuecke and Bill Allcock)
Introduction to Globus Toolkit Administration and Packaging,
Introduction, globus_common, globus_io, security
Resource Management
Data Grid--- GridFTP, GASS, replication
Track 2 (Administrator Tutorial, Charles Bacon)
Introduction to Globus Toolkit Administration and Packaging
Demo complete install and customization, Q&A, hands-on
Meeting for EPSRC e-Science Pilot Projects (Community Building)
25th January, 2002
Forty-six participants, from sixteen organisations, came to this event, organised by Jim Fleming of
EPSRC. Talks were delivered on an overview of the e-Science Centres, by Malcolm Atkinson, e-Science
Support by David Boyd and Steve Booth and the Grid Network Team by David Hutchison. Also discussed
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Appendix
e-Science Report
were web sites and other administrative issues, the Pilot Projects requirements from the UK Grid and
how the Pilot Projects can learn from each other.
UK Grid Portals/ Grid Services Workshop (Research)
28th–29th January, 2002
Fifteen participants arrived, from seven organisations, to this event, organised by Rob Allan, primarily for
UK and European participants. The aim of the meeting was to exchange information about the
technology being used in funded e-Science projects to build Grid Service based Application Portals,
including discussions of Globus and other middleware, CoG kits, Web Services, event and component
schema definitions, etc. The work of the Grid Computing Environments Research Group within the
Global Grid Forum in this area is an important step in building the ‘information layer’ of the Grid which
will be exploited for complex applications built from integrated computer resources, data, instruments
and software components. A number of groups were invited to make short presentations on topics of
interest and follow up with in-depth discussions.
IBM BlueGene Conference (Research)
15th–16th March, 2002
IBM sponsored this important event for eighty-nine distinguished guests from fifty-four organisations.
Organised by Dr Lindsay Sawyer, the IBM Blue Gene Protein Science project and the National e-Science
Centre hosted the Protein Science Workshop ‘Blue Gene 2002’. (The first Blue Gene workshop on Protein
folding was held in 2001 at San Diego, California, USA.) The purpose of the workshop was to bring
together scientists whose research is in selected areas of protein science, with emphasis on
computational approaches, to establish the status of the research, discuss open issues, reinforce
interactions and create new collaborations. The workshop consisted of invited talks divided in three
sessions (protein folding, enzymatic reactions and drug design, and systems biology) as well as of
contributed posters.
Tutorial on XML 1 (ToX1) (Training)
18th March, 2002
Fifty-one participants, from ten organisations, arrived for this one-day tutorial, intended for people with
little experience of defining and using XML schema. It focused on those aspects of XML that are
important for describing and communicating data, as these are essential foundations for working on
Web Services.
The tutorial was open to all who are participating in, or were planning to participate in, the UK eScience programme. It was also recommended for those coming to the Workshop on Web Services
(WoWS 1) who were not fluent in XML schema specification and use.
WoWS 1: Workshop on Web Services 1 (Training)
19th–20th March, 2002
Sixty participants from thirty-one organisations came to this workshop, organised by Malcolm Atkinson
and Rob Baxter. The workshop, led by Nick Todd of Stilo Technology, assumed familiarity with XML and
XML schema, at least to the level presented at ToX 1. As e-Science frequently involves the integration
of heterogeneous and distributed systems, one of the goals was to encourage the use of Web Services
where ever appropriate in e-Science. Our other two goals are to help build a mutually supportive
community of web service developers and to prepare the ground for OGSA. The workshop was open to any
members of the UK e-Science community and to those engaged on European Union funded Grid projects.
e-Science Report
Appendix
Getting OGSA Going One (GOGO) (Tutorial)
21st–22nd March, 2002
Thirty participants representing twenty-seven organisations came to this event, organised by Malcolm
Atkinson & Rob Baxter. Open Grid Services Architecture was put forward as a proposal at Global Grid
Forum 4 in both a panel and at Birds of a Feather (BOF) that is hoping to establish an Open Grid Services
Infrastructure Working Group. The UK e-Science community is proposing to actively engage in the
development and exploitation of OGSA through the OGSI WG. The primary goal of this first meeting was
to establish a community and working relationships in the UK that will support that proposed UK role.
This was a workshop where all participants were actively engaged in the work, to help develop joint
understanding, and to plan articulation of various activities.
Topics included:
• Discussion of OGSA (led by Malcolm Atkinson)
• Discussion of the OGSA model: Projects, Tools & Components, Progress & Problems
(led by Rob Baxter),
• Review of the potential synergy and duplication.
• Identification of Technical Challenges for the next 6 months (led by Rob Baxter)
• Discussion of Technical solutions and Plans
• Integrated Planning
Logic, Model Theory and Computation (Research)
4th–5th April, 2002
Fifteen participants represented eight organisations at this workshop, organised by Martin Grohe. This
was the third semestrial meeting of the Logic, Model Theory and Computation Workshop. The first two
meetings in this series took place in Cambridge and Swansea. The workshop was open to all interested
researchers.
Workshop on Distributed Software Management for e-Science (WoDSMeS)
(Community Building)
8th–11th April, 2002
Twenty-six participants, from twenty organisations came to this workshop, jointly organised by Alan
Simpson, Rob Baxter and Malcolm Atkinson. Because most e-Science funded projects are facing the
additional challenge of working in multi-organisational distributed teams, this makes project
management, quality processes and technical support far more difficult. Hence this was the first
workshop to initiate the process of jointly developing shared knowledge of how best to proceed, given
the realities of e-Science projects that involve companies and universities, computer scientists and
application scientists, and that often depend on international collaborations. The course components
introduced software tools, such as source code version managers, compilers, libraries, build managers,
development environments and diagnostic aids, along with introducing software design. Also addressed
was project management, with discussions on how to develop and support good practice for project and
software management that is realistic for UK e-Science projects. The intended outcome was the
initiation of an informal network of interested parties which shares ideas, methods and technical
solutions and formulates requirements to support the management of these e-Science projects and their
software production. Such formulated requirements should in turn lead to better provision of the
relevant software infrastructure.
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Terascaling meeting (Research)
12th April, 2002
Twelve people met for this meeting to discuss the issue of how to incorporate terascaling in Grid-based
applications.
Database Access and Integration (DAI) (Research)
15th–16th April, 2002
Thirty-two participants, representing fourteen organisations, met for this event, organised by Malcolm
Atkinson & Norman Paton. This workshop brought together members of the e-Science community who
were currently or expecting to make use of database access and integration facilities. The DBTF
presented its current understanding of requirements, its current Grid middleware development plans,
and its current view of priorities.
Highlights included:
• Introduction to Database Task Force – Norman Paton
• Database Requirements Analysis – Dave Pearson
• Overview of Planned Development Activities – Norman Paton
• Overview of the Open Grid Services Architecture – Malcolm Atkinson
• Baseline Grid Database Services – Brian Collins
• XML Data Access Services – Rob Baxter
• Web Services and Data Management – Tony Storey
• CERN's EDG Database Activities – Leanne Guy
• IBM Almaden's OGSA Database Activities – Inderpal Narang
• Discussion Group Commissioning – Norman Paton
• Future DBTF, DBTF & GGF Working Group Activities – Dave Pearson
UK Database Task Force (DBTF) and GGF DAG WG Meeting (Community Building)
17th April, 2002
Ten participants from seven organisations arrived at NeSC for this event, organised by Malcolm Atkinson
& Norman Paton. The UK e-Science DBTF and members of the Databases and the Grid (DAG) working
group met, together with invited guests and co-workers for the remainder of the DAI meeting and for
the following day. This meeting was by invitation only, and included discussions of ongoing/planned
development activities involving attendees, planned deliverables for GGF5, a review of the existing
‘Database Access and Integration Services on the Grid’ proposal and a technical discussion of RDB and
XML service proposals.
Official Opening of the National e-Science Centre (Community Building)
25th April, 2002
Over two-hundred guests arrived, representing the highest levels of seventy-six organisations,
companies and institutions for the Official Opening. We were particularly honoured by the presence of
the Right Honourable Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who officially opened the Centre.
Contributions to the opening were made by the Principals of Edinburgh University, Lord Sutherland of
Houndwood and Glasgow University, Professor Sir Graeme Davies. The opening was celebrated with a
VIP dinner, sponsored by the University of Glasgow, at St.Celia’s Hall. After being welcomed to NeSC by
Professor Malcolm Atkinson, a series of presentations were delivered to outline the use of Grid
technology.
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Appendix
Ontology and Astronomy (Research)
29th April, 2002
Eleven participants from six organisations gathered to at this NeSC event, in which each spoke about
Grid applications for ontological and astronomical researchers.
The Information Grid (Community Building)
30th April, 2002
Sixty-three distinguished guests, representing fifty-three organisations, arrived for this workshop,
organised by Dr Liz Lyon. This international workshop was a joint initiative between UKOLN and the UK
e-Science Core Programme and explored common approaches and challenges to the service provision
and description of datasets and information resources within the Research Grid/e-Science communities
and those working with the JISC-funded Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). The event
raised awareness of the service architectures and to describe current activities to progress thinking in
this area. The workshop considered the technical standards and protocols which are elements of the
service architectures, mechanisms for resource discovery, the role of ‘collection descriptions’, the use of
schema and descriptive metadata as well as terminology and semantics, quality assurance, provenance,
compressed archives, digital preservation, storage and security issues. The Keynote was delivered by
Professor Tony Hey, Director of the e-Science Core Programme. The international line-up of speakers
included Dr Reagan Moore (San Diego SCC), Professor Keith Jeffery (RAL) and Andy Powell (UKOLN), and
was jointly chaired by Dr Liz Lyon, Director UKOLN and by Professor Malcolm Atkinson.
Highlights included:
• JISC Information Environment and Architecture – Dr Alicia Wise, JISC & Andy Powell, UKOLN
• The European perspective – Professor Keith Jeffery, CLRC, RAL
• The US view – Dr Reagan Moore, San Diego SCC
• Digital preservation and model archiving – Kevin Ashley, ULCC
• Metadata generation, use & ontologies – Professor David De Roure & Dr Jeremy Frey, University
of Southampton
• Security and authentication – Dr Alan Robiette, JISC
• Data movement, management and resource discovery – Michael Breaks, Heriot-Watt University
• Data Storage – Dr Richard Durbin, Sanger Institute
Making the Grid work in a Computing Services Environment (Community Building)
1st May, 2002
Fifty-seven participants arrived, representing twenty-seven organisations at this event, organised by
David Boyd and Paul Jeffreys. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together Computing Service
providers and Grid developers to increase awareness of the Grid, to discuss requirements for
implementing and using Grid functionality on Computing Service resources and to develop agreed
recommendations on how to address these requirements. The meeting began with two talks, the first
providing an overview of the Grid vision and current Grid technology, and the second outlining key
requirements to be met for successfully implementing and using the Grid on Computing Service
resources defined as a function of time over the following twelve months. Topic highlights included an
overview of the Grid and the Globus toolkit, service requirements to enable Grid access to computing
resources in Universities and Centres, Grid software installation and support, directory services and other
operational components, Authentication, CAs and RAs, User Registration, Authorisation and Accounting,
and a discussion of Firewall networking and monitoring
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Bioinformatics Planning Meeting (Community Building)
2nd May, 2002
A small scale meeting with four people from two organisations discussing future Bioinformatics
applications for the Grid.
IBM Meeting Regarding eDIKT (Community Building)
14th May, 2002
Twelve participants, from IBM and Edinburgh University met at NeSC, to discuss the Electronic
Databases, Information & Knowledge Technology project.
Mobile Resource Guarantees (Community Building)
22nd May, 2002
Seventeen participants from five organisations met to discuss the ability to move code smoothly
between execution sites, as a key part of the technological infrastructure of future global computing
platforms. The pressure to supply and use mobile code in a global environment aggravates existing
security problems and presents altogether new ones. One particular security issue is the maintenance
of bounds on quantitative resources. Without some technological foundations for providing such
guarantees, global computing will be confined to applications where malfunction due to resource bound
violation is accepted as normal and has little consequence, as with internet computation today. With
more serious applications, resource awareness will become a crucial asset.
This project aims at
developing well-founded methods to spur technological progress in this presently under-studied area.
The main objective of the project is the development of the infrastructure needed to endow mobile code
with independently verifiable certificates describing resource behaviour.
Highlights included:
• Introduction to MRG, participants – Don Sannella, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
• Type systems for resource bounds – Martin Hofmann, Institut für Informatik, LudwigMaximilians-Universität München
• JVM and .NET comparison – Stephen Gilmore, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
• Grail and lambda-Grail – Kenneth MacKenzie, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
• The Grail cost model – Lennart Beringer, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
• ConCert project – Peter Lee, School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University
• MRG's High-level language – Olha Shkaravska, Institut für Informatik, Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München
• Compiling LFPL to JVM – Robert Atkey, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
• Formalising Toy MRG – David Aspinall, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Astrogrid Meeting (Research)
31st May, 2002
Organised by Bob Mann, nine invited participants from five organisations around the UK met to discuss
this £4million project, funded from the UK e-Science programme through PPARC, aimed at building a
data Grid for UK astronomy, as the UK's initial contribution to constructing an international 'Virtual
Observatory'. AstroGrid's three year programme comprises a one-year Phase A study, followed by a twoyear Phase B implementation. As Phase A draws to a close, the project is designing the architecture of
the system it will develop in Phase B, and this is one of a series of project meetings finalising that
architectural design.
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Tutorial on XML: Schema Design, Processing and Storage (ToX2) (Training)
5th–7th June, 2002
Twenty-four participants from ten organisations arrived at NeSC for this second Tutorial on XML, taught
by Nick Todd (Stilo Technology). A three-day intensive tutorial intended for people with little experience
of defining and using XML schema, it focused on those aspects of XML that are important for describing
and communicating data, as these are widely used in e-Science and are essential foundations for
working on Web Services. It covered schema design and schema processing to develop practical skills
and considered storage technologies for XML, including Xindices and use of these via the tools being
built in the OGSA-Database Access and Integration project. The tutorial also gave an opportunity to
develop practical skills using the software tool, XML Spy, as well as experiences with Xindices & an XML
storage service by Rob Baxter and Matt Egbert. Topics covered by the tutorial included well-formed XML
Instances, Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs), Composed XML documents, Standard and Complex XML
Schema types, reuse of schema definitions, Validity of XML Instances with respect to schema, xsi:type,
Design of XML schema and Validity checking, Processing XML, Available software & standards and
Categories of XML parsers. The event concluded after giving examples of XML programming practice.
The ‘Pod’ was used as a training lab for all practical sessions.
Bioinformatics Meeting (Research)
6th June, 2002
Organised by Professor Bonnie Webber, this was one in a series of informal bioinformatics meetings, at
which people from the local area talk about their work related to bioinformatics.
WoWS 2: Workshop on Web Services 2 (Training)
10th–12th June, 2002
Thirty-two participants from fifteen organisations met at NeSC for this second workshop, taught by Nick
Todd (Stilo Technology). This workshop was a three-day intensive practical course with opportunities for
hands-on work. The workshop assumed familiarity with XML and XML schema, at least to the level
presented at ToX 2. It considered all of the aspects of Web Services in as much depth could be managed
in the time available. It also made a review of available tools, by sharing the knowledge of the
participants and by Access Grid presentations. The first day was allocated predominantly to oral
presentation of the concepts of web services and a discussion of their application. The remaining two
days also offered time for people to try practical exercises or discuss issues. Topics covered included
Motivation, Web Services Application Architectures & Service Stacks, Web Service Description Language
(WSDL) & Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Creating Web Services (mostly using Apache Axis),
Registering and Discovering Web Services (WSIL & UDDI), Platforms, Tools and Middleware. As with the
previous tutorial, the ‘Pod’ was used as a training lab for all practical sessions.
Getting OGSA Going 2 (GOG 2) (Community Building)
13th–14th June, 2002
Nineteen participants met for this event, representing eleven organisations. Organised by Malcolm
Atkinson and Steve Newhouse (LeSC), it discussed the Open Grid Services Architecture, put forward as a
proposal at GGF4 in both a panel and at a BOF that is hoping to establish an Open Grid Services
Infrastructure WG. The UK e-Science community has agreed to actively engage in the development and
exploitation of OGSA through the OGSI WG and through its GGF Database Access and Integration WG.
The meeting followed an OGSA Early Adopters Workshop at Argonne National Labs. The two goals of
the meeting were to develop and share understanding of OGSA and how work should develop, and to
develop a community that will sustain the efforts of early UK OGSA adopters.
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Edinburgh & Glasgow Bioinformatics Collaboration (Community Building)
17th June, 2002
For this event, members of the Bioinformatics community in Edinburgh and Glasgow met to discuss
mutual interests in using Grid technology for collaboration in research.
Proposals for future
developments were also put forward, as well as an overview of developments up to this point.
WoDL 1:Workshop on Discovery Link 1 (Training)
24th–25th June, 2002
Twenty-five participants, from eighteen organisations, arrived for this workshop, organised by Malcolm
Atkinson, Andy Knox (IBM) and David White (IBM), featuring a Web Lecture on DiscoveryLink. The
workshop started by introducing the capabilities of Discovery Link and showing participants how it may
be use to access data from a number of different databases. It showed how adapters are built to access
various forms of database and semi-structured data, and developed an understanding of operational
issues, such as required platforms, the optimiser and development tools. Through IBM's Scholar's
Programme both DB2 and Discovery Link are freely available to researchers. The workshop was divided
across two days: the first being general education and lectures, and the second featuring hands-on
tutorials. The objectives were to show the capabilities of Discovery Link as an aid to research, to
demonstrate how to connect a number of databases so that researchers in their discipline can use them
as an integrated resource, and to encourage the formation of a community of e-Science Discovery Link
users. Highlights included a lesson in DB2 quick conversion, a DiscoveryLink Technical Overview, with
Implementation and wrappers (BLAST, Documentum, etc), finishing with a Review of Federated Query
Processing. For this event, the NeSC support staff were able to hire additional workstations and,
effectively, construct a temporary computer lab for hands-on training.
N+N Collaboration with China (International)
26th–27th June, 2002
More than thirty-five delegates, representing over twenty-four organisations in the UK and China, met
at NeSC for this ground-breaking event, organised by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences
Research Council, and jointly hosted by the BBSRC and the National e-Science Centre. The event was
intended to encourage collaboration between the UK and the Chinese e-Science Communities.
Delegates from both countries met to discuss a variety of e-Science topics, including post genomics,
drug discovery, structural genomics and biodiversity.
GGF5/HPDC11 – Co-located Workshops (Research)
21st–26th July, 2002
As well as the main GGF5/HPDC11 event described earlier in this report, there were a number of
collocated events. These included:
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Appendix
Meeting
Date
Organisers
SUN HPC Workshop
19–20 July
Brian Hammond, Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara,
Applications Workshop
20 July
Ed Seidel, Max-Planck-Institut fur Gravitationsphysik,
Germany
GridLab
21 July
Andre Merzky, Zuse Insitute, Berlin
Intergrid
21 July
PPARC
Active Middleware Services
23 July
Dennis Gannon, Salim Hariri
Grid Luminaries
23 July
Andy Knox, IBM, Rochester
JSSPP
24 July
Dror Feitelson, The Hebrew University
GRIDSTART Cluster Plenary
25 July
Maureen Wilkinson, EPCC
WACE/HPDC
26 July
Mike Papka, Jason Leigh, Department of Computer Science,
Argonne
Further details for these co-located events can be found at the eSI past events website detailed above.
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