Issue 32, June 2005
News Contents
Professor Peter Higgs
visits NeSC
Tony Hey to join Microsoft
Globus Toolkit Version 4
released
EGEE celebrates 1st
birthday in Athens
Global Grid Forum
The MSc/Diploma in
e-Science at The
University of Edinburgh
Gridnet2 Announcement
Announcements and
Events
NeSC News
www.nesc.ac.uk
Professor Peter Higgs - “My Life as a Boson”
Peter Higgs, FRSE, FRS and Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh
was the invited guest at the e-Science Institute to talk to second year PhD
students in e-Science attending the PPARC Postgraduate School in May. He
talked about his well known contribution to the understanding of the of the origin
of mass and his part in predicting the existence of a new particle, now called the
Higgs boson.
He started his talk by drawing a parallel to his own attendance at the first
Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics in July 1960 along with some
now well known physicists including Cabbibo, Glashow, Robinson and Veltman,
two of whom have gone on to be awarded Nobel Prizes. His talk continued by
outlining his research developments and findings over the following 20 years.
Professor Higg’s answer to the final question at the end of the evening “At what
point did computers come into your life?” was “They still haven’t, I don’t even
have a television!” highlighting that research techniques in physics have
undergone significant changes in 40 years.
Feedback from the School participants and other physicists from Edinburgh
University invited to the talk was highly positive. Many said they found it
extremely useful and enjoyed being able to hear Professor Higgs in person.
The main aim of the School was for students to have the opportunity to network
with their peers, share ideas through individual presentations and group
discussions, to gain a broader perspective and benefit their future research.
During the week other speakers included Dr George Beckett and Mr Neil Chue
Hong from EPCC who spoke on RealityGrid and OGSA-DAI respectively, Dr
Chris Maynard (Institute for Physics, Edinburgh, QCDGrid), Dr John Taylor
(Institute for Astronomy, Edinburgh, AstroGrid) and Dr Steve Thorn (NeSC,
GridPP). Dr Mark Parsons spoke on the Commercial aspects of the Grid.
Other parts of the programme looked at emerging standards and developments
in the National Grid Service (NGS) and the EU Funded Project Enabling Grids
for e-Science (EGEE).
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
events@nesc.ac.uk
This is the third year that the School,
organised by eSI in conjunction with PPARC
has run, and many students gave positive
feedback about the opportunity to make
contact with others working on related
projects, to gain understanding of what
others are researching and to be able to
learn about GRID developments.
More information on the event can be found
at: http://www/nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/544
Photo of Peter Higgs taken by Peter Tuffy,
University of Edinburgh
Tony Hey Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing at Microsoft
Tony Hey is joining Microsoft Corp. as a Corporate Vice President to coordinate the Technical Computing Initiative
(TCI). He will work across the company to coordinate Microsoft’s efforts to collaborate with the scientific community
worldwide. Hey moves to Microsoft as one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field of parallel computing and also
as Director of the UK’s e-Science Initiative.
“I am sure his impact on Microsoft will be as significant as his contributions to UK research. His unerring leadership
and drive have given the UK research community an enormous boost and a great
platform on which to build. He will be sorely missed.”
Malcolm Atkinson, Director of NeSC
As head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of
Southampton, Hey (pictured right) helped build the Department into one of the
pre-eminent computer science research institutions in England. He is also a fellow
with the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the European Union’s
Information Society Technology Advisory Group. In addition, Hey has advised a
number of countries on advancing their scientific agenda and how to become more
competitive in the global technology economy. Hey received a Commander of the
Order of the British Empire honor for services to science in the 2005 U.K. New Year’s
Honours List. Hey is a graduate of Oxford University with an undergraduate degree in
physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics. Professor Hey will officially join
Microsoft on June 27, 2005. but will still be fulfilling his commitments to the UK
e-Science Programme until October of this year.
Globus Toolkit Version 4 (GT4) Released
Globus Toolkit version 4 (GT4), released on April 30 2005, represents a significant advance over earlier GT versions
in terms of software quality, functionality, and standards conformance. Quality has been a major emphasis during the
18 month development period and in particular the 6 month alpha-beta period, in which over 150 people
participated.
Functionality includes not only the GridFTP data movement service, GRAM job submission and management
service, Reliable File Transfer service, Replica Location Service, Community Authorization Service, OGSA Data
Access and Integration, and MyProxy services included in previous releases (although with multiple-order-ofmagnitude improvements in scalability in several cases) but also new services such as a Workspace
Management service (for dynamic accounts), Data Replication Service, Grid Teleoperation Control Protocol
service, and an expanded set of Monitoring and Discovery services. In terms of standards conformance, GT4
provides probably the most full-featured implementation of Web services security available anywhere; a full-featured
GridFTP implementation; and support for the WS Resource Framework and WS-Notification specifications in C,
Java, and Python containers. For further information see http://www.globus.org/toolkit/
EGEE Celebrates First Birthday in Athens
Global Grid Forum (GGF)
365 delegates attended the third EGEE Conference at the Ledra Marriott hotel
in Athens on 18- 22nd April 2005. The event marked the halfway point in
the project and provided delegates with the opportunity to look back over the
achievements of the first year as well as look ahead to the final year of the
project
The Global Grid Forum has
approved two new groups namely:
The OGSA-D-WG co-chaired by
Dave Berry (National e-Science
Centre) and Allen Luniewski (IBM)
and The ByteIO-WG co-chaired by
Mark Morgan (University of Virginia)
and Neil Chue Hong (EPCC,
University of Edinburgh).
Key issues discussed at the conference were the certification and
deployment of gLite and the migration of the many applications already
deployed on the infrastructure. gLite is the next generation middleware for
EGEE Grid computing. Born from the collaborative efforts of 11 different
academic and industrial research centres, gLite provides a leading-edge,
best-of-breed framework for building grid applications tapping into the power of
distributed computing and storage resources across the Internet.
The Fourth and final EGEE conference for phase 1 of the project, will take
place in Pisa in Italy between 24 and 28 October 2005.
NeSC Announce
Gridnet2 Announcement
NeSC has been told informally that the GridNet2 application will be funded by the EPSRC e-Science Core
Programme and the JISC JCSR. Formal comfirmation has not yet been received. Therefore there is no guarantee
that any funds will be available in time for GGF14. We appologise for this potential gap in funding.
However, we have been advised to go ahead, solicit applications, assess them through the standard procedures using
advice from the GridNet2 Advisory Board (GNAB2) and be prepared to make allocations. Then if the University of
Edinburgh is able to start GridNet2 before GGF14, expenses at GGF14 for those approved by GNAB2 will be
claimable. This means that your institution will need to take the risk when booking for GGF14 that GridNet2 might not
start in time. More information will soon be available at: http://www.nesc.ac.uk
GridNet2 differs from the previous GridNet1, in that a wider range of expenses are eligible but those funded are
required to engage in coordination and reporting.
Those funded by GridNet1 are remined that all invoices should now have been sent as the final report is due by June
30th. Malcolm Atkinson will also be asking for updates on the work you reported when he was bidding for GridNet2, to
include in the final report.
OGSA-DAI new releases
Networks for Non-Networkers 2 (NFNN2)
New releases of OGSA-DAI
software (in-source and binary
distributions for GT3, GT4 and
Axis) are now available.
A one and a half day workshop for people working at the technical level in
high-bandwidth dependant science is taking place on Monday 20th and
Tuesday 21st June 2005 at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh.
They can be accessed directly from
the project website:
http://www.ogsadai.org.uk/downloads
This release builds on the
functionality of previous OGSA-DAI
releases and provides support for
different “flavours” of OGSA-DAI
and middleware platforms. In
particular this release includes the
first supported versions of OGSADAI for GT4.0 and OGSA-DAI for
OMII_1_2 will be released soon.
Support is provided by the
OGSA-DAI team at:
http://www.ogsadai.org.uk/support/
A users mailing list is available at:
users@ogsadai.org.uk
A list of some of the projects already using OGSA-DAI is at:
http://www.ogsadai.org.uk/projects/
It is not aimed at network researchers or networking experts, but at people
trying to use the network for science. Through a series of presentations from
experts in their field the workshop aims to giving attendees an introduction to
computer networks and the performance issues surrounding them (TCP, LAN,
end-user systems etc.). We also hope to have demonstrations of relevant
tools and performance issues available during the breaks. NFNN2 provides an
improved version of last year’s event (http://grid.ucl.ac.uk/NFNN.html).
This workshop will equip participants with the basic knowledge and set of
starting points required to begin investigating network performance problems
that may arise in their day-to-day work. There will also be opportunity for
questions and further discussion.
As further motivation, there is no registration fee for attending NFNN. Although
NFNN is a general workshop, it will be of particular interest to those
working with high-bandwidth Grid projects.
For more information, please email: nfnn@dl.ac.uk
SSDBM 2005
The 17th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database
Management (SSDBM 2005) is now accepting registrations at:
http://regonline.com/ssdbm2005
The conference will be held at the Donald Bren School of Environmental
Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara
27-29 June 2005. The fees will be $600 regular / $300 student. You must
register as soon as possible.
Third International Summer School on Grid Computing
Forthcoming
e-Science
Technology Event
“The 3rd International Summer School on Grid Computing 2005” will be held in Vico
Equense, Italy (pictured below) from Sunday the 10th July until Friday the 22nd July
2005. A total of 80 students will be admitted. There are some places still available. This half-day event will look at
the UK’s latest products and
The students attending will consist of young researchers (from technical industries,
services for e-Science and is
research laboratories, and academic environments) who have recently started (or are aimed at research projects
about to start) working on grid research projects - of which there are many funded by that are facing decisions
the EU, the US and countries in Asia Pacific.
about which technologies they
should depend on. Its
Through lectures, discussions, directed reading and the reports from leading
programme will include
researchers, students will receive an integrated and well-structured introduction to
presentations on the NGS,
grid computing and its applications. This will expose principles, research challenges
OMII and OGSA-DAI, followed
and leading views on the potential of general purpose e-Infrastructures. A practical
by a Q&A panel session.
exercise will also run throughout the two weeks illustrating progressively more of the
functions that may be achieved by e-Infrastructure and developing experience with
Jointly organized by NeSC
several widely used technologies.
and IBM UK, the event will
be held at IBM South Bank in
The school is being sponsored by the Global Grid Forum and funding support has
London on Monday 18 July
been pledged by the UK e-Science Program, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear 2005.
Physics (INFN), Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking
(ICAR-Napoli), Institute for Composite and Biomedical Materials (IMCB), and SPACI
For further details and on-line
consortium.
registration please visit:
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/
For more details about places available, curriculum, organisation and costs, please
events/603/
see the 2005 school web site:
http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/GridSummerSchool2005/
First DIALOGUE Workshop:
Applications-Driven Issues in
Data Grids
August 1 & 2, 2005
Blackwell Inn, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA
First International Conference on e-Social Science
The First International conference on e-Social Science will take place at the
Manchester Conference Centre from Wednesday 22nd to Friday 24th June
2005. There will be Key note speeches by Christine Borgman,
Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, UCLA, Gary M.
Olson, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, University of Michigan
and Tony Hey CBE, Professor and Director e-Science Core Programme,
EPSRC
There are six workshops to choose from on the first day and there is also
a FREE Agenda Setting Workshop on Collaboration, Co-Laboratories and
e-Research on the 20th of June. There will also be 32 full papers
presented, 3 panel sessions featuring national and international experts,
a poster display and a sponsors exhibition. Registration includes reduced
rates for students.
For more details please see the website http://www.ncess.ac.uk/
Tel: 0161 275 1380 Email: gillian.sinclair@ncess.ac.uk
The First DIALOGUE workshop
will be held on Monday 1 and
Tuesday 2 August 2005 at the
Blackwell Inn, Ohio State
University, Columbo, Ohio.
Presentations and discussions at
this first DIALOGUE workshop will
cover applications scenarios that
reveal issues encountered in the
participants’ current data grid
solutions. Presentations may
discuss how such issues can be
generalised and abstracted so that
they can be addressed by
existing grid middleware and/or
may propose potential middleware
approaches to address these
issues. Presentation abstracts
<1000 words should be submitted
to dialogue@datagrids.org
by June 13, 2005.
http://www.datagrids.org/workshops.cfm
The MSc/Diploma in e-Science at the University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh is building on its prominence in e-Science to offer an exciting new one-year
postgraduate programme. Students can either take two semesters of taught courses leading to a Postgraduate
Diploma in e-Science, or supplement that with an extended individual research project for an MSc in e-Science.
The programme will provide students with an appreciation of the principles underlying e-Science and with practical
experience of using current e-Science technologies. This expertise, together with the transferable skills developed
during the programme, will provide an equally good preparation for students wanting a career in scientific research
or in the commercial IT sector.
The programme consists of a set of mandatory courses covering core e-Science topics, plus optional courses
chosen from a large pool. These cover computer science and other scientific disciplines within which e-Science
techniques can be applied, and allow students to tailor a curriculum to their own individual interests.
The programme comprises lectures, exercise classes, tutorials and individual study, and will be assessed via a
combination of exams and coursework.
Applications are encouraged from graduates of all areas of science, engineering and computer science, and from
those currently working in a relevant field. Entrance requirements are a good honours degree or equivalent work
experience, and proven competence in programming. Applications for 2005/06 places are still being accepted and
EPSRC studentships are available to support some students taking the programme.
For Further Information please see http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/degrees/msc_escience.html or informal
enquiries may be addressed to the Programme Director, Dr Robert Mann, by email, to rgm@roe.ac.uk.
Usability Tutorial Summer School
The Usability Task Force in e-Science and EPSRC are sponsoring
a usability tutorial summer school for anyone in the e-Science
program. The 4 day event will take place on Monday 6 June Thursday 9 June 2005 at the e-Science Institute, 15, South
College Street, Edinburgh. It will aim to provide a practical
overview of usability design methods, grounded in e-Science
examples, to help teams improve design in their projects.
The takeaways from the event will be to provide participants with
a set of methods and resources for incorporating usability design
into their projects. There will be a series of tutorials covering a
range of topics appropriate to usability design in e-Science. The
tutorials will be presented by experts in each area. The tutorials
will also describe methods for the iterative cycle of design, from
requirements gathering, to prototyping to evaluation. We will
present ways for you to integrate these techniques into existing
projects.
New PhD Projects Presented at
Jamboree
Leena Al-Hussaini joined the National e-Science
Centre in February of this year to work on her
PhD in the context of the OGSA-DAI project,
under the supervision of Malcolm Atkinson,
Director of the National e-Science Centre. She
recently presented in the annual Informatics
Jamboree event held at the University of
Edinburgh. This 2-day event is run by
Edinburgh’s Informatics Department and has a
section for new PhD students to present their
research. Further details about her talk
“Service-Based Approach to Schema Matching”
can be found at:
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/jamboree/2005/
leena.pdf
The tutorials are FREE to e-Science project members. Travel and Visitors to NeSC
accommodation support is available for PhD students funded by
an eScience project, but is limited, so please apply early.
This month NeSC welcomes Dr Yongwei Wu and
Further information can be found at:
Prof. Kai Nan from the Chinese Academy of
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/542/
Sciences. They will be working at NeSC for the
next two months as part of the visitors programme.
NextGRID GGF Workshop
NextGRID will be holding a workshop on 27 June as
part of GGF_14 in Chicago. Entitled “Why, how & when
to invest in working with GGF - Improving Interaction
between Grid Standards & projects Community”. The
workshop will run from 9am - 12pm
For more details visit:
http://www.ggf.org/ggf_events_next_schedule.htm
eSI Visitor Programme
eSI runs a programme for international visitors. Their
visit must be based at eSI, but we encourage visitors to
help organise workshops and to visit other e-Science
Centres. Please talk to our Research Manager Dave
Berry, or the Director Malcolm Atkinson if you would like
to suggest potential visitors. You can also email:
visitors@nesc.ac.uk with any suggestions.
Forthcoming Events
Event Title
Venue
Date/s
More info
Usability in e-Science
NeSC
6-9 June 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
Introduction to Computing and the
National Grid Service
NeSC
13-14 June 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
Campus Grid Meeting
NeSC
16-17 June
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
Networks For Non Networkers 2
NeSC
20-21 June 2005
email: nfnn@dl.ac.uk
Grid Performance Workshop
NeSC
22-23 June 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
First International Conference on
e-Social Science
Manchester
Conference Centre
22-24 June 2005
http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/
Global Grid Forum 14
Chicago, IL, USA
27-30 June 2005
http://www.ggf.org
gLite for Application Development on
EGEE
NeSC
4-5 July 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
17th International Conference on
Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2005)
Appleton Tower,
University of
Edinburgh
6-10 July 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
3rd International Summer School on
Grid Computing
Vico Equense, Italy
10-22 July 2005
http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/
GridSummerSchool2005/
e-Science Technology Event
IBM South Bank
London
18 July 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/
2005 International Description Logic
Workshop
NeSC
26-28 July 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
Automated Reasoning Workshop
NeSC
26-28 July 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/
First DIALOGUE Workshop
Ohio State University 1-2 August 2005
http://www.datagrids.org/workshops.cfm
VLDB 05Workshop
Trondheim, Norway
2-3 September
2005
All Hands Meeting 2005
East Midlands
Conference Centre,
Nottingham
19-22 September http://www.allhands.org.uk/
2005
Technical Report series
The UK e-Science Technical
Report series is available for
publishing reports from any UK
source.
We organise the review of
candidate reports, and welcome
offers of reports and of help with
reviewing.
http://www.vldb.org
UK e-Science Jobs of interest
CancerGrid Software Engineering Research Assistants (2 Posts)
Location: Cambridge University Closing date: 6th June 2005
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/jobs/rase.html
Research Associates (2 Posts)
Location: University of Cardiff Closing date: 20th June 2005
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/schoolsanddivisions/divisions/humrs/jobs/
academicresearchsenior/ref368.htm/index.html
Accounts Administrative Secretary
Location: National e-Science Centre Closing Date: 21st June 2005
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/career
Glasgow Access Grid
Our jobs page shows e-Science vacancies across the UK. You can find it at:
If you would like to book time on
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/career
the AG, please contact: Susan
Andrews. Phone: 0141 330 8648 To advertise a vacancy, please mail Susan Andrews: andrewsm@dcs.gla.ac.uk
E-mail: andrewsm@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Contact Information
For more information on anything mentioned in the newsletter, please contact Alison McCall, NeSC Project
Officer, on alison@nesc.ac.uk or telephone 0131 651 4783
The deadline for submission for the July edition of NeSC-News is Wenesday 22nd June 2005.