Issue 36, November
News Contents
Edinburgh research
team receives
follow-on funding of
£1.86million
Pisa EGEE 4th
Conference
JISCmail Digital
Preservation List
GridPP’s Tier-2 sites
break the 100TB barrier
Super Computing 2005
Global Grid Forum 16
Calls
New Online Teaching
and Learning section
on NCeSS Website
Announcements and
Events
For more information on
anything mentioned in the
newsletter, please contact
Alison McCall
alison@nesc.ac.uk
Telephone 0131 651 4783
Newsletter produced by:
Alison McCall
and Jennifer Hurst
Next month’s deadline for
articles is 30 November 05.
NeSC News
www.nesc.ac.uk
Edinburgh research team receives
follow-on funding of £1.86million.
The OGSA-DAI project, based in the
University of Edinburgh, is driving
forward the complex area of scientific
data access and integration, which
in the future could provide us with
better ways of screening for cancer or
predicting destructive weather events.
Together these three centres represent
a community of some 6000 users. By
combining the centres’ expertise in
OMII-UK the e-Science Core Programme
is establishing a powerful source of
well-engineered software, enabling an
integrated approach to the provision
of higher level and more advanced
Since 2002, OGSA-DAI has been
tools than before, better tuned to the
engaged in developing ‘Grid middleware’, requirements of the research and
the software that supports the pooling
development community. OMII-UK will
of very large digital data collections
provide a significant basis for international
and large-scale computing resources
collaborations and standards, developing
held at different sites across the globe.
more advanced tools to empower new
This is known as e-science. OGSA-DAI
research in a wide range of disciplines.
middleware is now used worldwide to
support a whole raft of e-science projects. Tony Hey, former Director of the Core
The project’s development and research Programme and now Vice President
Technical Computing, Microsoft
team are based at EPCC and NeSC, at
the University of Edinburgh.
Corporation, said: ‘I am delighted that
the UK e-Science Programme’s early
OGSA-DAI project leader Prof. Malcolm
investment in the OGSA-DAI project
Atkinson said: ‘This fantastic £1.86 million has paid off so well and that we now
grant gives an additional 3 year’s funding see a major contribution of open source
for the excellent and very strong team
middleware used throughout the world.
at Edinburgh that has already produced
The future of grid computing will rest on
data access and integration middleware
our ability to access and integrate the
used worldwide for major grid projects.
worldwide cornucopia of information
The funding gives us the opportunity to
resources. The next challenge is to
sustain our support of the community
deliver easily used tools that make these
of 1500 registered users and the major
powerful facilities accessible to every
applications, such as, in the US, Cancer scientist.’
Grid and the LEAD project – which is
Dr Anne Trefethen, current Director, said:
focused on real-time data collection
to predict tornado formation – and
‘It is important that we have the means to
AstroGrid, a UK government-funded,
support software developed under the UK
open source project designed to create a e-Science Programme so we can sustain
working virtual observatory for British and those components that researchers rely
international astronomers.’
on. OMII-UK will provide this support and
sustain the UK’s leadership in e-Science.’
The grant is part of a three-year,
£3.8million investment by the UK ehttp://www.ogsadai.org.uk/
Science Programme to establish the Open
Data Management on the
Middleware Infrastructure Institute-UK
(OMII-UK). Three UK universities –
NGS Training Event
Edinburgh, Manchester and Southampton
– will pool their expertise, experience
8/9 December, e-Science Institute,
and resources gained from working on
Edinburgh
many other internationally-recognised and
For more information and to register go to
successful e-science projects.
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/esi.html
Issue 36, November
Global e-Infrastructure Reports Landmark Results at European Conference
scientists to do calculations that were once hugely time
consuming much faster”. He gave the example of a group
working on drug discovery for malaria that had managed
to reduce computer simulations of 46 million potential
drug candidates, the equivalent of 80 years on a single
PC, to just a few months work on the Grid. During
a visit to CERN today, to be briefed about the EGEE
project on the use of Grids by CERN, Viviane Reding,
European Commissioner for Information Society and
Media, said “On hearing about EGEE’s achievements, I
wanted to see for myself some of the practical benefits
that this Grid technology is providing. I’m very satisfied to
see such a major step forward in collaborative computing
between scientists across Europe and even on a global
scale. Europe’s strategic investments in Grids and in
the GÉANT network infrastructure are certainly already
paying dividends.”
At October’s EGEE Conference a number of key results
reported that the project is on the road to achieving a
global Grid infrastructure for science. It was announced
that the EGEE infrastructure, which spans over 150
sites in Europe, the Americas and Asia, had surpassed
2 million computing jobs, or the equivalent of over 1000
years of processing on a single PC.
The EGEE infrastructure, which is linked by Europe’s
GÉANT high-speed communications network, as well
as similar networks for scientific research around the
world, spans across 40 countries. Only 18 months after
the launch of the EGEE project, well over 1000 users
around the globe are using the EGEE infrastructure to
accelerate their computing tasks, which cover some
six scientific domains and some 20 major applications,
ranging from particle physics to drug discovery for
combating malaria.
Vivian Reding, European Commissioner for Education
and Culture, said “EGEE’s achievements represent a
major step forward for collaborative computing between
scientists on a European and even global scale. I’m
very satisfied to see this project making such rapid
headway, and leveraging so effectively Europe’s strategic
investments in the GÉANT network infrastructure.”
The fourth EGEE conference was held at the Palazzo
dei Congressi, and hosted by the Italian National
Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in the centre of
the historic city of Pisa. It featured speakers from
the international scientific and IT community, local
authorities and the European Commission. The theme
of this event, “Global and Persistent e-Infrastructure for
Scientific Knowledge in the 21st Century”, was explored
during the course of the week through plenary sessions
as well as more focused parallel discussions, which
gave participants the opportunity to discuss a wide
range of issues related to Grid computing and multiscience research infrastructures.
The EGEE project, funded by the EC initially for
two years, aims to build on recent advances in grid
technology and develop a service grid infrastructure
which is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day. The
project aims to provide researchers in both academia
and industry with access to major computing resources,
independent of their geographic location. The EGEE
project identifies a wide-range of scientific disciplines
and their applications and supports a number of them for
deployment. For more information see:
http://public.eu-egee.org/.
For more information contact:
François Grey, CERN. Email: Francois.Grey@cern.ch
“The results for EGEE so far are very satisfying, and
well beyond our initial expectations,” commented
Fabrizio Gagliardi, the EGEE project director at CERN
“clearly the Grid is a service that will allow many
JISCmail Digital Preservation List
Next month will mark the 5th anniversary of the JISCmail digital preservation list. Over a thousand professionals
in some 37 countries worldwide now subscribe to the list. A report showing the distribution of subscribers
by country is copied below for information. The list has always been international in outlook but its original
documentation and remit from five years ago emphasised its UK roots.
This list carries announcements and information on activities around the world relevant to the preservation and
long-term management of digital materials.
It is intended to be a moderated low-traffic announcement and current awareness list of selected key initiatives
and developments in the field of digital preservation of interest to archivists, curators, data creators, librarians
and records managers and other sectors. Topics will include: digital archiving,curation,management and
preservation; electronic records management; digital memory; emulation; migration; long-term access; research
projects; national, international and institutional initiatives in relevant areas.
The webpage to join the list or access the list archives can be found at:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/digital preservation.html
NeSC News
2
Neil Beagrie, Digital-Preservation list
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 36, November
Grid Applications and Performance BOF at Super Computing 2005
A BOF will be held at SC 2005 to discuss the needs of e-Scientists and performance tools. Applications are being slowly
adapted to run over multiple administrative domains in a coordinated manner, but rarely achieve even a fraction of the
performance possible with their underlying systems.
This is in part due to users rarely knowing what performance could be achieved. There is no current data or infrastructure
from which to formulate estimates of baseline performance, that in turn can be used to compare current application
performance with that achievable through some degree of tuning.
In June 2005 application scientists and tool developers joined at the Third International Grid Performance Workshop to
discuss the latest research, and the needs of Grid applications with respect to performance and monitoring data. The
sessions developed a set of recommendations for future work. This BOF will allow further discussion between tool and
application stakeholders to forward performance work in Grids.
By Dr Jennifer Schopf
More information is available at: http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~jms/GPW2005/bof.html
GridPP’s Tier-2 Sites Break the 100TB Barrier
The GridPP storage group have announced that total
storage capacity for GridPP’s Tier-2 sites has now reached
more than 100TB - enough to store the complete works
of Shakespeare over 20 million times. Sites at Edinburgh,
Glasgow, Imperial College and Lancaster have recently
installed and published significant amounts of new disk
storage, taking a big step in providing storage resources on
the scales that will be required in the LHC era. Not only has
the capacity increased, but the vast majority of the storage
is now accessible via the storage resource manager (SRM)
interface. Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford have
also recently switched to the use of SRM.
By the time the LHC turns on in 2007, GridPP Tier-2 sites
will be providing almost 900TB of SRM-enabled storage equivalent to more than 180 million copies of Shakespeare.
The figure above shows the recent rapid increase in
available storage, rising from around 20TB available 3
months ago, to the current figure of nearly 130TB
The SRM interface is an open standard for grid middleware
to communicate with site specific storage fabrics. It is
designed to provide interoperability between diverse mass
storage systems, and the Grid need not know whether it is
talking to a simple disk file system or a petabyte scale tape
robot.
UK’s First Optical Network Gives Boost to
e-Science
The UK’s first dedicated optical network for research
will be put to the test at SC05 (SuperComputing 2005)
by e-Science projects in astronomy, particle physics
and molecular biology. SC05, the premier international
conference on high performance computing, networking
and storage, takes place from 12-18 November 2005 in
Seattle, Washington State, US.
The protocol itself is a collaboration (http://sdm.lbl.gov/
srm-wg/) between three US DoE laboratories (Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory, and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator
Facility), CERN, and CCLRC Rutherford Appleton
Laboratory. It also has a GGF working group, GSM-WG.
UKLight, the UK’s high bandwidth (1Gbit/sec) optical
network, linked to similar networks around the world,
enables researchers to transfer far greater amounts of data
directly from one remote location to another than would
be feasible with conventional, packet-switched networks.
Installation of the first phase was completed this summer
when the final three of nine UK academic sites were
connected.
Greig Cowan of GridPP (University of Edinburgh) describes
further, “It is very important for interoperability that all
Grid sites have a standard way to access their storage.
Tier-2’s can currently choose from two different software
implementations of the SRM interface, either dCache or
DPM. The aim of the GridPP storage group is to deploy
SRMs at all Tier-2 sites and we are currently building
up experience in both pieces of software to support this
rollout.”
The umbrella programme which brings projects such as
these together to test UKLight is called ESLEA (Exploitation
of Switched Lightpaths for e-Science Applications). “These
projects have already provided invaluable insights into
the potential of UKLight, and early indications are that its
high bandwidth facility will significantly enhance the UK’s
e-Science research capability,” says Mr Colin Greenwood,
ESLEA project manager at the National e-Science Centre,
Over the course of 4 months, GridPP has increased the
total Tier-2 storage capacity by a factor of 6. Over a similar
time scale, the project has deployed SRM interfaces to 10
out of the 17 LCG Tier-2 sites in the UK. These levels of
deployment place GridPP at the forefront of the deployment
and testing of LCG middleware that is essential for the
success of LCG.
NeSC News
Edinburgh.
3
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 36, November
Call for Proposals Educause 2006
GGF NOMCOM 2006 Call for Volunteers
The GGF Nominations Committee 2006 needs you!
Applicants are invited to submit proposals for presenting
at next year’s annual Educause meeting which will be
held October 9-12, 2006 in Dallas.
http:// www.educause.edu/conference/annual/2006]
GGF are looking for volunteers for NomCom 2006,
the GGF nominating committee that is responsible for
recommending candidates to fill open positions on the
Grid Forum Steering Group (GFSG). Typically, one
third of the GFSG is selected each year. This year we
expect to have to fill 12 positions, although this can
change due to the creation or elimination of positions
by
the GFSG, or by resignations, transfers, etc.
This is a terrific conference where information
technologists, librarians, faculty, and administrators come
together to explore issues of information access and
technology in higher education. Over 7,000 participants
from 41 countries attended Educause 2005.
This year the “Library” track has been expanded to
focus on two topic areas. The first addresses issues
surrounding the development, delivery and preservation
of digital content and the other concerns information
resources and services. Other tracks/ topic areas
include teaching and learning, leadership, planning and
assessment and more. Therefore, there is a lot of latitude
to showcase your project!
The nominating process is modelled after IETF RFC
3777, “IAB and IESG Selection, Confirmation, and
Recall Process: Operation of the Nominating and
Recall Committees”. IETF RFC 3777 supersedes IETF
RFC 2727 which the GGF GFSG adopted, with minor
revisions, in 2003.
The first phase in the NonCom process is to establish
this year’s nominating committee; this is being done
by this year’s NomCom Chair, Sven van den Berghe,
along with Dietmar Erwin, past Chair, and Ramin
Yahyapour, GFSG liaison.
Proposals may be submitted online at
http://www.educause.edu/ conference/annual/9291 and
they must be submitted by January 23rd, 2006.
Potential topics in the Library track:
Digital Content Creation, Delivery, and Preservation
Information Resources and Services
To qualify for the NomCom, a volunteer must have
attended 2 of the last 4 GGF meetings. NomCom
members are barred from nomination to the GFSG
during the year they serve, even if they later resign.
A volunteer should be able to commit 2-3 hours per
week for at most 8 months (the process will start in
January 2006 with the aim of completion by the start of
September 2006). Community members who feel they
meet these requirements and are interested in helping
are encouraged to volunteer.
If you would like more information about Educause go to
http://www.educause.edu/.
Mary Molinaro
Director, Preservation and Digital Programs
University of Kentucky Libraries
Cambridge e-Science Technical Forum
Meeting
Please e-mail your name, affiliation, telephone
number(s), and email address to Sven van den
Berghe, Sven.vandenBerghe@uk.fujitsu.com, not
later than Saturday November 26, 2005 (midnight
UTC). Please put “NomCom volunteer” in the
subject line.
Tuesday 6th December
Dr. Jennifer Schopf (Edinburgh & Argonne National Lab)
All talks will be held at 2pm in meeting room 4 at the Centre
for Mathematical Sciences, Wilberforce Road.
Volunteering for the NomCom is a way in which you
See http://www.escience.cam.ac.uk/techforumMich05.html
New Online Teaching & Learning Section on NCeSS Website
Insight is a brand new area of the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) website dedicated to helping you
reach a better understanding of how e-Science can assist you as a social science researcher. It consists of a collection
of resources which illustrate the some of the many ways in which technology is starting to enhance social science
research, both now and as is emerging at the cutting edge.
Insight features: tutorials and guides, pilot demonstrator software walkthroughs, case studies of pioneering research,
FAQs, course details.
Visit Insight and win one of 3 fabulous 1 gigabyte memory sticks! Ideal for transporting files between laptop and PC, just
one stick holds the equivalent of 710 floppy disks. The competition deadline for winning a memory stick is 2 December.
Visit Insight for more details: http://www.ncess.ac.uk/insight/
Hazel Burke, NCeSS, UNiversity of Manchester
NeSC News
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www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 36, November
GGF16 Registration Open
The 16th Global Grid Forum hosted by Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) will be held in Athens,
13-16 February 2006. The 4 day meeting will take place at the Divani Caravel Hotel ideally situated in the heart of
the city. GRNET will offer an exciting regional plenary program that will bring together Greek and other European
experts in the field of grid and distributed computing. In addition to the regional program, GGF16 will provide an
environment to continue the work of our Standards Groups through WG/RG sessions, BoFs and workshops. GGF’s
community program will continue throughout the week, emphasizing the applications and operation of grids in
research and industry settings. The community program will consist of workshops, invited talks, technical tutorials, and
demonstrations of standards-based implementations of grid software. For more information and to register please visit:
http://www.ggf.org/GGF16/ggf_events_ggf16.htm. Hotel reservation deadline is 30 November 2005, information is
available at: http://www.ggf.org/GGF16/ggf_events_lodging_ggf16.htm.
Building on the success of Community Programs at GGF14 and GGF15, the Community Program at GGF16 seeks to
build new and strengthen existing communities of interest in GGF. GGF is comprised of a number of “communities of
interest” who either are users of grids in their domain or develop innovative approaches to perceived roadblocks to the
adoption of grids. Community activities may run in parallel with other GGF16 activities but every attempt will be made in
scheduling to minimize unnecessary clashes. Send your suggestions to
http://www.ggf.org/GGF16/suggestions/ggf_events_communitySuggestions.php.
Other GGF Events next year:
GGF17 Tokyo, 9-12 May 2006, GridWorld, Washington (tbc), 10-14 September 2006
Matlab Distributed Computing Seminar
The Reading e-Science Centre, in conjunction with
Mathworks, the world’s leading developer and supplier
of technical software, will be holding a seminar on the
use of Matlab in the e-Science community. The Matlab
computing platform; a high-level programming language
and environment for technical computation and numerical
analysis is widely used in science, engineering and
technical computing and as such there is considerable
interest in using it within GRID/CampusGrid and Virtual
Research environments.
The seminar will consider the general use of Matlab in
e-Science as well as the specific use of the Matlab
Distributed Computing Engine. It will also provide a
forum for users of Matlab within the UK e-Science
community to meet and discuss projects.
Call for Registration: Integrative
Neuroimaging; Computing Challenges and
Solutions
18th-19th January 2006, University of Newcastle
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ion/news/workshophome.htm?event=1
Contemporary human, primate and small animal neuroimaging
produces increasingly voluminous data, which is captured,
registered, analysed and archived in a diverse range of
structures and formats. In addition specific to particular imaging
technologies, e.g. f-MRI, we have recently seen the evolution of
organised resource interchange mechanisms, based on GRID
computing, which are allowing neuroscientists to share data,
software and equipment, and compute across economical,
ubiquitous parallel computers developed by the UK e-Science
Programme.
For researchers interested in imaging populations of neurones,
and analysing their large scale neuroimage datasets, this has
Speakers will include Prof. Simon Cox, Technical Director
provided considerable scope. At the forefront of this research,
of the Southampton e-Science Centre and leader of
neuroscientists wish to develop methods that can support
the GEODISE project, Joss Martin from the Mathworks, and and simplify quantitative integration of data produced by f-MRI
Prof Glen White from Queen Mary, University of London.
studies, and a range of complementary imaging techniques (EEG,
MEG, PET etc), which augment f-MRI by allowing the researcher
The Seminar will be held at The University of Reading’s
to investigate known phenomena at a variety of levels of scale.
New Technology Institute on Thursday 24th November
As a result of the disparity of these techniques, experiments
2005.
tend to produce data that is both extremely voluminous, and
heterogeneous. To extract best value and optimum insight
For further details of the event please visit the seminar’s
from this data, it is necessary to develop stable and adaptable
web site at http://www.resc.reading.ac.uk/matlab or
computational methods that can support data integration,
contact either Dr Ian Bland of the University of Reading
(I.M.Bland@reading.ac.uk) or Chris Denly of The Mathworks maximise utilisation of the computation available to the data,
(chris.denly@mathworks.co.uk).
NeSC News
and generate new insight.
5
www.nesc.ac.uk
Issue 36, November
Forthcoming Events
November
12-18
Supercomputing 2005 (SC2005)
Seattle, USA
http://sc05.supercomputing.org/
14
Grid 2005 Workshop
Seattle, USA
http://pat.jpl.nasa.gov/public/grid2005/
20-23
Ensuring Long-term Preservation and Adding Value to Scientific and
Technical data (PV 2005)
The Royal Society
of Edinburgh
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/pv2005/
24-25
DCC All Hands Meeting
e-Science Institute,
Edniburgh
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/631/
5-7
Microarray Design and Analysis
e-Science Institute,
Edinburgh
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/
events/625/
5-8
International Conference on e-Science and Grid Technologies Melbourne,
Australia
http://www.gridbus.org/escience/
8-9
Data Managment on the NGS
e-Science Institute,
Edinburgh
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/esi.html
12-15
3rd International Conference on Service Oriented Computing
(ICSOC 2005)
Amsterdam, The
Netherlands
http://www.icsoc.org/
15-17
ICSC Congress on Computational Intelligence Methods and
Applications
Istanbul, Turkey
http://www.cima2005.org/
9-10
2nd DIALOGUE Workshop
e-Science Institute,
Edinburgh
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/
events/636/
13-14
WWW2006 Programme Committee Meeting
e-Science Institute,
Edinburgh
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/
events/584/
18-19
Integrative Neuroimaging;Computing Challenges & Solutions
University of
Newcastle
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ion/news/
workshophome.htm?event=1
26-27
Designing for e-Science: Interrogating new scientific practice
for usability, in the lab and beyond
e-Science Institute,
Edinburgh
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/
events/613/
December
January
February
8
Higgs-Maxwell Particle Physics Workshop: Future Accelerae-Science Institute http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/
tors and Future Physics
events/590/
For more events please look at the NeSC website: www.nesc.ac.uk/events
National Centre for Text Mining Workshops
http://www.nactem.ac.uk
A series of seminars addressing various aspects of Text
Mining and associated fields will be held at the University
of Manchester, usually on a Friday at 2:00pm. For precise
details of each seminar, please go to (http://www.nactem.
ac.uk/Seminars/).
Call for AHRC Applications
The Arts and Humanities Research Council is pleased to
announce a call for applications for Research Workshops
in the area of e-Science. This call is part of the broader Arts
and Humanities e-Science Initiative, which the AHRC has
set up in partnership with JISC, the UK’s Joint Information
Systems Committee.
Next two seminars in series:
1. 2pm, 25th November, 2005
Bringing together biomedical literature, databases and
ontological resources: Approaches and Obstacles
Speaker: Dr Dietrich Rebholz-Schumann (Group Leader,
European Bioinformatics Institute)
The Initiative aims to have a transforming impact in developing ICT expertise in the Arts and Humanities (A&H), in enabling researchers to develop and work with digital resources,
and in facilitating collaboration not only within their own
fields, but with researchers in other subjects and disciplines.
2. 2pm, 16th December, 2005
Text Mining - A Cure for Depression? (The Trials,
Tribulations and Fantasies of a Database Curator
Speaker: Professor Theresa Attwood (Faculty of Life
Sciences, University of Manchester)
For further information see http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/e-science
Christmas Closure
NeSC Edinburgh will close at 5pm on Friday 23 December
for the Christmas period and re-open on Thursday 5 January
2006.
More information contact: Richard Barker:
[r.barker@manchester.ac.uk]
If you would like to hold an e-Science event at the e-Science Institute, please contact:
Conference Administrator, National e-Science Centre, 15 South College Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AA
Tel: 0131 650 9833 / Fax: 0131 650 9819 / Email: events@nesc.ac.uk
NeSC News
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www.nesc.ac.uk