Issue 34, August 2005
NeSC News
www.nesc.ac.uk
The e-Science Institute is Changing – an Introduction to
Themes
News Contents
The e-Science
Institute is Changing
Global Grid Forum:
Standards Update
First DIALOGUE
Workshop
Third International
GRID School
P-Grade NGS portal
nternational Workshop
on Scientific
Instruments & Sensors
on the Grid
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 31st August 2005.
Anna Kenway, Deputy Director, e-Science Institute
http://www.esi.ac.uk
Mission: To provide an
international centre of
research-led excellence in
order to stimulate invention
and exploitation of e-Science
methods and technologies.
The e-Science Institute (eSI) has four
years of experience in stimulating and
organising events for the UK’s e-Science
community and of hosting visitors who
interact with that community. The initial
programme at eSI was shaped by the
pressing need to form the UK’s e-Science
community across all disciplines, to
help it develop an understanding of
the challenges and available solutions,
and to develop skills. That responsive
programme has been very successful:
During its four years, eSI has run an
average of seven events a month,
attracted over 10,500 delegates and
clocked up 24,000 delegate days. There
are over 3,000 talks and papers arising
from events on this website. It has
also hosted 39 visitors and 7 long term
researchers, who have been associated
with the Institute from 6 months to a
year each. All have made significant
contributions to the research activity of
the UK e-Science programme and to the
event programme of the Institute. This
responsive mode will continue while there
remains a need for a rapid response to
community issues.
At the same time both the community
and its needs are evolving and so the
main thrust of eSI’s work is changing
to focus on longer-term and research
centred topics. This is being achieved by
running themes (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/
esi/themes/) that develop a topic over a
period of six months to a year, through
a series of workshops and meetings at
eSI and elsewhere. Researchers who
are interested in the topic and want
to collaborate on the work will also be
invited to apply to the visitor programme at
eSI. A call for suggested theme topics will
be made on a regular basis (the next one
will be in September 2005 but proposals
can be made at any time) and selection of
topics will be by the recommendation of
the eSI Scientific Advisory Board. Themes
will be developed by a ‘Theme Leader’
who is in effect a long-term funded visitor
at eSI. For further details on all aspects
of our themed programme, please visit our
website.
We are delighted to announce that the first
identified theme on ‘Information Services
for Smart Decision Making’ is already
underway and is being led by Dr Jennifer
Schopf who has been a long-term visitor
at eSI from Argonne National Laboratory.
The second theme on ‘Exploiting Diverse
Sources of Scientific Data’ is currently
under preparation and is initially being
led by Malcolm Atkinson. To develop
this theme fully, we are looking for a
Theme Leader who has the knowledge
and interest to develop this topic to its full
capability. If you are interested in leading
this topic, please contact anna@nesc.
ac.uk directly, enclosing your current CV.
Issue 34, August 2005
Global Grid Forum: Standards Update
Dave Berry, NeSC
group. Another document submitted for publication by the
GGF is a guide for producing other OGSA profiles.
Two important developments were announced at GGF14
in Chicago. One is the imminent publication of the
first profile and roadmap for the Open Grid Services
Architecture (OGSA). The other was the establishment
of a working group to co-ordinate activity between several
standards development organisations. The meeting also
saw workshops on Healthcare Security and Privacy, Grid
Applications, NextGrid, Globus Toolkit 4, Building a Grid
in Africa, and a Grid Primer for Managers, in addition to a
packed programme of working group sessions.
Grid standards activities have several examples of
collaboration across organisations. One example is the use
of the Common Information Model (CIM) from the DMTF
to model various Grid services, including relational data.
Another is the use of Web Services Distributed Management
(WSDM) for resource management – at the GGF
meeting, IBM and HP demonstrated interoperating WSDM
implementations on an RIM Blackberry. The OGSA WSRF
Basic Profile mentioned above makes use of specifications
that grew out of GGF work and were then moved into
OASIS. And of course the entire Web Services strategy
uses standards developed in the W3C.
OGSA is GGF’s flagship architecture project. The OGSA
working group works with and co-ordinates teams in
GGF and other SDOs who are producing Web Services
specifications of relevance to Grid computing. The new
roadmap document gives dates for the publication of the
initial specifications that will form part of OGSA.
The new SCRM (pronounced “Scrum”) working group
brings together representatives from the IETF, OASIS, the
W3C, DMTF, SNIA and GGF. The full title of SCRM is the
“Standards development organizations Collaboration on
networked Resources Management”. It provides a forum for
these groups to discuss their plans, seek opportunities for
collaboration, and avoid duplicating effort. The group held
a panel session at GGF, at which all the representatives
stated their hopes for enhanced co-operation between their
organisations.
Chief among these documents is the OGSA WSRF Basic
Profile, which specifies a base set of specifications for
implementing Grid services. This profile is modelled on
WS-I profiles, which perform a similar function for basic web
services. Indeed, the OGSA profile requires the WS-I Basic
Profile as a building block. Profiles define how a group of
specifications can work together and specify how the
specifications should be used to make an interoperable
First DIALOGUE workshop on
Applications-Driven Issues in Data
Grids
Mario Antonioletti, EPCC
DIALOGUE [1] provides a forum for organisations
producing data focused middleware for Grids in order to
gain a deeper and wider understanding of requirements
as well as allowing experiences of the participants to be
shared amongst the group. The aim is to come up with
common co-operative strategies for developing interoperable middleware components to provide data access
and integration capabilities to Grids. To this end a series
of workshops have been scheduled for members of the
community to share experiences and pose requirements.
The first workshop was held in August at Columbus, Ohio.
The main theme for this workshop was on “ApplicationsDriven Issues in Data Grids”.
The second day of the workshop concentrated on
middleware providers giving summaries of the middleware
they produce to address the data needs. These included:
Globus’ Data Storage Interface, OGSA-DAI, Data Cutter,
Mobius, STORM and OGSA-DQP amongst others. Areas
for collaboration were established with potential linkage
between OGSA-DAI and STORM, Project Mobius/Mako
and OGSA-DQP.
The first day of the workshop concentrated on data grid
applications. A number of different projects discussed the
experiences of data integration, security, data mining and
general framework of their applications and middleware in
the context of Grids. This included some large US projects
like caBIG [2] which is attempting to form a Grid enabled
virtual organisation for the purposes of sharing cancer
research data and LEAD [3] which is attempting to create
an integrated, scalable cyber-infrastructure for mesoscale
meteorology research and education. These projects,
as well as the others, laid down the requirements and
experiences of using existing middleware.
NeSC News
A final third day allowed the organisations involved within
DIALOGUE to have a further in-depth discussion exploring
potential areas of collaboration to ensure a common
approach to data in Grids. This first workshop was deemed
to be a success. Presentations from the meeting will be
available from [4]. The next workshop is scheduled to take
place in December at NeSC, Edinburgh.
[1] http://www.datagrids.org/ [2] https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/
[3] http://www.lead.ou.edu/ [4] http://www.datagrids.org/
workshops.cfm
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Issue 34, August 2005
Third International GRID School attracts
students from all over the world
Alison McCall, NeSC
This summer, for the third year running, young researchers
and students nterested in using or developing Grid
technologies travelled from 17 different countries to Vico
Equense, just south of Naples in Italy, to extend their
knowledge of GRID Computing at the Third International
Summer School on Grid Computing.
Throughout two weeks in July, sixty-four students
received an in-depth introduction to Grid technologies
and applications. They received more than seventy hours
of lectures and practical exercises, which took place on
the equipment installed in the school site. In addition,
directed reading and reports from leading researchers gave
participants an integrated and well-structured introduction to
grid computing and its applications.
and Networking (ICAR-Napoli), Institute for Composite and
Biomedical Materials (IMCB), and SPACI consortium, FIRB
Grid.it Project, EGEE Project, Condor Project
Planning has already started for the next year’s Summer
School. Malcolm Atkinson, Chair of ISSGC06 Programme
Committee commented; “The excellent students, the
worldwide recognition and the enthusiastic atmosphere of
these summer schools means that there is already a band
of international experts lining up to teach at the school next
year.”
One student summed up the experience as: “The most
intensive summer school and best integrated tutorials I have
attended. Keep it going! Thanks for the great effort you
have put into the school.”
The curriculum of the school was designed and delivered
by an international committee of experts and many staff
from NeSC, in particular staff from the Training Team were
involved extensively in the planning and delivery of the
programme.
For more information please refer to the ISSGC05 website
at:
http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/GridSummerSchool2005/
index.htm
Globus Toolkit 4.0.1 Available to
Download
Malcolm Atkinson, David Fergusson, Mike Mineter and
Richard Hopkins and many others travelled to Vico Equense
specifically to provide first hand training, lectures and
practicals on Unix, XML & Java, Introduction to Service
Oriented Architecture & Web Services, Data grids and
Principles of Distributed Data Management, Introduction
to the Data Access and Integration (DAI) challenges
and strategies, T– Global Data Grids and Semantic and
Autonomic Grids. There was also a day dedicated to
teaching the students about the EGEE project and the
gLite middleware. Staff were on-hand throughout the
school helping with the general organisation and local
arrangements and providing secretarial support.
The GT4 development team is pleased to
make 4.0.1 available for download. This
incremental release includes important fixes
for bugs reported against version 4.0.0 of the
Globus Toolkit (GT4). Highlights of release 4.0.1
include:
• Adoption of Version 2 of the Apache
License, without modification
• Improved support for Apache Tomcat
• Improved support for message-level
security in C WS Core
• Integration of the WS MDS
vulnerability fix
• Many bug fixes
• An updated version of OGSA-DAI,
containing the complete set of public
interfaces
• The addition of a new tech preview
component, an early release of the
SweGrid Accounting System (SGAS)
Professor Miron Livny, Chair of this year’s Programme
Committee commented: “Once again the international
summer school demonstrated the power of openness,
sharing and collaboration which are the pillars of Grid
computing. Students and instructors with a broad spectrum
of interests and expertise came together to get exposed
to new ideas, share requirements and collaborate on
addressing the challenges we face in translating the
concepts of distributed computing into dependable tools. “
The summer school provided students with a key
opportunity to learn the basics of grid computing hands-on.
More information can be found on the NeSC
Homepage http://www.nesc.ac.uk
The school is was endorsed by the Global Grid Forum
and sponsored by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear
Physics (INFN), Institute for High Performance Computing
NeSC News
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Issue 34, August 2005
Grid Computing Now Website
P-GRADE NGS portal
Tamas Kiss, University of Westminster
Grid Computing Now! is a new web site set up as part
of the Department of Trade and Industry’s Knowledge
Transfer Network programme.
The Centre for Parallel Computing at University of
Westminster is pleased to announce the P-GRADE
NGS portal for the UK NGS Community. The P GRADE
NGS portal offers an alternative to the NGS Portal for
executing and monitoring computational jobs on the
UK National Grid Service infrastructure. In addition,
it enables the graphical development, execution and
visualisation of workflows – composed of sequential
and parallel jobs – on NGS resources. The P GRADE
NGS portal is based on the P-GRADE portal, which is
the official portal of several European production Grids,
notably SEE-Grid and Hun-Grid).
The National e-Science Centre is working on Grid
Computing Now! in partnership with IT trade body Intellect
UK as part of the IECnet project.
The aim of the site, and of IECnet overall, is to share
knowledge and experience about the use of grid, or
inter-enterprise computing, to stimulate and encourage
companies who are interested in moving to this new
model of computing.
We plan to create a community of business owners, IT
leaders and intermediaries who can discuss their own
interests in grid computing with experts and experienced
users.
The P-GRADE NGS portal has been developed
collaboratively by the Centre for Parallel Computing
at the University of Westminster and the Parallel and
Distributed Systems Laboratory of the MTA SZTAKI
Research Institute. The Portal service is operated by
the University of Westminster.
The project is being funded by the DTI as part of the
Global Watch Online programme, which aims to give UK
public and private sectors access to insights on strategic
technologies.
Main features of the P-GRADE NGS portal
The P-GRADE NGS portal offers portlet-based
solutions to support:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Take a look at http://www.gridcomputingnow.org
Developing workflows from sequential and
parallel
MPI programs
Executing workflows on NGS resources
Monitoring NGS resources
Accessing MyProxy servers to manage user
certificates and proxy credentials
Transferring input and output files among
storage and computational resources
automatically
Visualizing graphically, and in real time, the
runtime execution of jobs and workflows
Loading jobs and workflows into the Portal
directly from the P-GRADE application
development environment.
New NGS Partner
Lancaster University has become the latest and third
self-funding partner site to join the NGS. This follows
a collaboration between the Centre for e-Science
and Information Systems Services to grid-enable the
University’s central High Performance Cluster.
Further information can be found within the Lancaster
NGS SLD (Service level Definition) at: https://www.ngs.
ac.uk/sites/lancaster/LancasterNGSNodel.0.pdf
If your site is interested in joining the NGS, see
http://www.ngs.ac.uk
ac.uk for further details.
The Portal has been designed bearing in mind the
needs of users with little or no knowledge of grid
systems implementations. The internal details of the
grid have been hidden in such a way as to allow any
computational scientist to rapidly gain access to the
design and execution functions provided by the Portal.
GEMEPS Funding Confirmed
NeSC has been informed by BBSRC that the bid
“Grid Enabled Microarray Expression Profile Service
(GEMEPS)” has been accepted for funding. This is a
collaboration with Cornell University, RIKEN Institute
Japan and Sir Henry Wellcome Functional Genomics
Facility at Glasgow University. The work will entail
extending some of the data grid work/tools from the
BRIDGES Project.
The main homepage of the P-GRADE NGS portal can
be found at: http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk/ngsportal
NeSC News
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Issue 34, August 2005
eSI Call for a Theme Leader in
‘Exploiting Diverse Sources
of Scientific Data’
International Workshop on Scientific
Instruments and Sensors on the Grid
Melbourne, Australia, 5 December 2005
Peter Turner, University of Sydney, Australia
CALL FOR PAPERS
As Grid technology matures, increasing attention
is being directed towards instruments and sensors
as sources of data. Data collection is not a rote
procedure, and often interacts profoundly with
interpretation and analysis, whether by human
or machine. The increasing use of in silico
experiments and the integration of model-based
simulation with physical sensors, further couples
the collection of data with analysis and simulation.
Ignoring these interactions can lead to the inefficient
use of both computational and human resources.
The e-Science Institute is preparing a series of workshops
and events around the above theme topic. Three events
are already in the advanced stages of planning; the
first in November is on Spatiotemporal Databases for
Geosciences, Biomedical sciences and Physical
sciences is already open for registration. This will be
followed by a meeting sponsored jointly with Oracle
in which Chris Date will present a talk titled ‘Temporal
Database in Depth: Time and Data Warehouse.’
This theme is currently being led by Malcolm Atkinson,
but we are seeking a long term visitor (a ‘Theme
Leader’) who has the knowledge and interest to
carry the development of this topic forward to its full
capability. The Institute will fund half salary (up to a
maximum of £25k for a year pro rata), travel and some
other expenses.
For full details on the themed programme please visit
our website at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/themes/
Operational models may range from remotely-accessing
a one-stop, full-service instrument site to dynamically
composing distributed instrument, data, and analysis
services into a virtual instrument organization. A unified
paradigm for Grid-enabling both physical instruments
and virtual instruments will result in flexible, extensible
systems for exploiting the tremendous potential of
information technology. Many instruments and sensors
are already digitally-accessible, but they are poorly
integrated into the Grid. Instruments and sensors are
qualitatively distinct from computation and data, and
present unique challenges and issues for current Grid
technologies.
If you are interested in leading this topic, please contact
anna@nesc.ac.uk, enclosing your current CV.
This workshop, in conjunction with e-Science 2005, will
seek to address the issues and challenges assciated
with the utilisation of instruments and sensors, both real
and virtual, on the Gird.
e-Science Technology Meeting a Success
Kostas Touras, NeSC
Authors are invited to submit papers for presentation
at the workshop. Abstracts are due by 25 August
2005, and papers are due by 1 September 2005. The
proceedings of the workshop will be publised by the
IEEE.
This half-day event was recently held on 18 July at IBM
South Bank in London. Jointly organised by NeSC and IBM
UK it presented the UK’s latest products and services for
e-Science. Chaired by Prof. Tony Hey, Director of the UK
e-Science Core Programme, the event attracted a diverse
audience of delegates from both ongoing and upcoming
research projects in e-Science.
For more information:
International Workshop and Submission of Papers:
http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~kchiu/isog05/
e-Science 2005: http://www.gridbus.org/escience/
Following presentations on the NGS, OMII and OGSA-DAI,
a lively Q&A panel session discussed security, product scalability and general access to the grid. Particularly worthy of
note was the interest received from delegates working in
the Social Sciences, an area into which e-Science is rapidly
expanding.
Contacts
Kenneth Chiu (kchiu@cs.binghamton.edu) Simon Coles
(S.J.Coles@soton.ac.uk) Peter Turner (p.turner@chem.
usyd.edu.au)
NeSC News
e-Science
Institute
More information can be found at:
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=603
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Issue 34, August 2005
August
22
Event: Electric Connections 2005: A AK Bell Library Theatre, York
Vision for Virtual Scotland
Place, Perth
http://cosmic.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/currentevents/ec2005.htm
2-3
VLDB 05Workshop
Trondheim, Norway
http://www.vldb.org
6-9
Workshop on Grid Middleware and
Geospatial Standards for Earth
System Science Data
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/540/
9
Workshop on Grid Performability
Modelling and Measurement
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/495/
12-13
Application Development on the
NGS
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/569/
14-15
OMII_1 Infrastructure
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/570/
15-16
Scientific Workflow Management
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/602/
19-22
All Hands Meeting 2005
East Midlands
Conference Centre, Nottingham
http://www.allhands.org.uk/
25-27
Cardiovascular Haemodynamics
and Modelling
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/587/
28-29
e-Health Event
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/esi.html
26-30
GirdKa Summer School,
FZK, Karlsruhe, Germany
http://www.egee.nesc.ac.uk/shedreg/index.html
29-30
Induction to Grid Computing and
the National Grid Service
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/563/
29-30
DCC Conference
Hilton Hotel, Bath
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/dcc-2005/
4-6
Blue Gene and QCDOC Workshop
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/589/
5-6
Blue Gene System Software Workshop
e-Science Institute
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/607/
24-28
EGEE04 Conference
Pisa, Italy
http://public.eu-egee.org/conferences/4th/
September
October
eSI Call for Visitors
Welcome to...
e-Science
Institute
Mòrag Burgon-Lyon, who is with us for 6 months, working
50% of her time as a Scotgrid Systems Administrator and 50%
deploying Network Monitoring Software at LCG Tier 2 sites.
The e-Science Institute is preparing a series of workshops
and events around the theme topic ‘Exploiting Diverse
Sources of Scientific Data’. The first event in November is
on Spatiotemporal Databases for Geosciences, Biomedical
sciences and Physical sciences. This will be followed by a
meeting sponsored jointly with Oracle in which Chris Date
will present a talk titled ‘Temporal Database in Depth: Time
and Data Warehouse.’ More workshops, meetings and
research opportunities are planned.
Gillian Law, who has recently filled the position of Technical
Journalist on the IECNet Project.
Alberto Sánchez, a PhD student from the Polytechnical
Univeristy of Madrid, who is visiting NeSC this summer to
learn more about OGSA-DAI in relation to his studies.
Sébastien Talpe, who is the new Accounts Administrative
Secretary for NeSC.
If you are interested in being a visitor at eSI, participating
in the programme and collaborating on work in this area,
please apply to our visitor programme at http://www.nesc.
ac.uk/esi/visitors_programme.html. Potential visitors
interested in collaborating in other areas of e-Research are
also encouraged to apply.
Goodbye to…
Terry Rodgers who worked at NeSC for just over three years.
More recently he was working as EDIKT Secretary and
with the EGEE Team. He started and developed the NeSC
Newsletter, producing over 30 monthly issues. He has left to
retrain as a Primary School Teacher.
All informal enquiries should be made to:anna@nesc.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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