NEWSLETTER
Issue 21, July 2004
Back issues available on website:
www.nesc.ac.uk
Professor Clarke Appointed
to the Chair of e-Science
We are delighted to announce that Professor Peter Clarke has been appointed
to the Chair of e-Science at the University of Edinburgh. Currently Head of
the Particle Physics Group at University College London (UCL), as well as
a founder of the UCL e-Science Centre of Excellence in Networking, he is
involved in the development of Grid computing for the LHC and other large eScience applications. He is a member of the UK Grid for Particle Physics project
and also works within the EU-funded EGEE project, as well as being a member
of the Global Grid Forum Steering Committee and co-Director of the Data Area
within the GGF. He takes up his post on 1st October, 2004.
http://www.phys.ucl.ac.uk/people/staffmember.php?id=150
Photo: University College London
Forthcoming Events
July 2004
Tue 6 Jul
Grids: What are they and where are
they going? (with BNCOD ‘04)
Thu 8 Jul
HPCx User Group Meeting
Fri 9 Jul
HPCx Annual Seminar
Wed 14 Jul
Engineering Task Force meeting
Mon 19 Jul - Wed 21 Jul
Workshop on Grid Applications
Programming
Wed 21 Jul
SAGA-RG face-to-face meeting
Thu 22 Jul - Fri 23 Jul
Service Grids: Current Activity &
Middleware Requirements
August 2004
Wed 11 Aug
Visit from the University of Seoul
Mon 23 Aug - Fri 27 Aug 2004
Edinburgh Summer School in
Neuroinformatics
More information is available at:
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events
One in a Million:
ScotGrid
The ScotGrid system was first
deployed on June 25th 2002. Two
years on, the total CPU usage is more
than 1,000,000 CPU hours and the
total number of jobs processed is more
than 100,000. This represents a major
landmark in terms of deployment of the
system.
A planned re-build of the system in
April 2004 has doubled the available
CPU and quadrupled the available disk
at Glasgow. The team are employing
Grid Technologies beyond ScotGrid
and have begun full scale integration
of the system with prototype Grids
across the UK and Europe.
At present ScotGrid (Glasgow) is
integrated with LCG-2 Grid, the basic
Grid System for the EGEE project and
the GridPP testbed, work is underway
to integrate the Edinburgh and Durham
systems.
Staff News
We would like to welcome Doctor
Richard Hopkins to NeSC; he joins the
EGEE Training Team in Old College
and wish him every success in his new
role. We would also like to thank Mark
Cavanagh, who leaves NeSC after
nearly three years, for all his hard work
for us. Bob Mann has been appointed
to a Lectureship in Astronomy, and will
be the Director of a new e-Science
MSc course, being developed jointly
with colleagues in Informatics. More
information on e-Science vacancies
across the UK at:
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/career
Deadline for All Hands
Meeting 2004
Please note that registration for the
All Hands Meeting 2004 closes on
the 30th July. The meeting will take
place in the East Midlands Conference
Centre, Nottingham. You can register
on the website:
https://www.delegatebookings.co.uk/
ScotGrid is currently in Phase 2 of the
allhands/front.htm
project where in particular the high
performance disk server at Edinburgh
has been significantly upgraded, with
NeSC Contact Details
a total capacity of 24 TBytes. Jobs are
currently being submitted testing all If you would like to hold an e-Science
aspects of the CPU farms, disk server, event at the e-Science Institute, please
network and Grid middleware that will contact the Conference Manager at:
be required as ScotGrid enters the
National e-Science Centre,
Grid Production phase.
15 South College Street, Edinburgh,
EH8 9AA United Kingdom
More details of this can be found on
Tel: 0131 650 9833
the NeSC web site:
Fax: 0131 650 9819
http://www.scotgrid.ac.uk/
Email:events@nesc.ac.uk
NEWS EXTRA
Issue 21, July 2004
EGEE Report:
Web Services and GT3
courses at NeSC
During June two linked course were run
at NeSC as part of the Enabling Grids
for E-science in Europe (EGEE) project.
http://egee-intranet.web.cern.ch/egeeintranet/gateway.html.
NeSC is the lead partner in the EGEE
training and induction activity. Building
on the experience of successful
courses in the UK and at CERN
(introducing new EGEE members
to the project), the NeSC training
team responded to requests from
the local bioinformatics community
by presenting two courses aimed at
providing an introduction to basic
Grid technologies for applications
developers.
Back issues available on website:
www.nesc.ac.uk
Visitors at NeSC
NeSC Services
Upcoming visitors for 2004 include:
Jim Blythe (USC Information Sciences
Institute) in July; Seth Ruffins
(Californian Institute of Technology)
and Ilya Zaslavsky (University of
California) in August; and Alexander
Woehrer (University of Vienna) who will
be with us for three months from July.
Jobs
Our jobs page shows e-Science
vacancies across the UK. To add
a position to this page, please mail
Susan Andrews:
andrewsm@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Recent visitors to the e-Science
Institute include Chaitan Baru from the
San Diego Supercomputing Centre at
the end of June this year, and Wayne
Schroeder, who visited the National eScience Center for two weeks in May.
For more information, please refer to
his web page at:
http://www.sdsc.edu/~schroede
During his stay with us, Wayne gave
a series of four SRB tutorials, a SRB
Overview talk at the HEPiX Mass
A two-day course of presentations and
Storage Workshop and a seminar on
worked tutorials on Web Services was
the SDSC Storage Resource Broker,
held on the 3rd & 4th June. Following
details of which can be found at:
on from this a second two-day course,
mainly consisting of “hands-on”
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/433/
examples of use of the Globus Toolkit
3, was held on the 24th & 25th of June.
Wayne has also kindly written a report
Both courses were fully booked.
of his visit, which can be found at:
Positive feedback was received from
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/visitors/
these courses, and demand has been
reports/103_report.pdf
noted for further Web Services courses
in particular. For further information,
please refer to:
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.
e-Science Projects
NeSCForge
NeSCForge is a SourceForgelike facility for supporting project
development.
Glasgow Access Grid
Projects Database
The
Projects
database
stores
For further information and suggestions
If you would like to book time on the information about e-Science projects.
about training events at NeSC please
AG, please contact Susan Andrews on Please help us keep this up to date by
email:
0141 330 8648
sending additions and corrections
andrewsm@dcs.gla.ac.uk to Susan Andrews.
training-support@nesc.ac.uk
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/past.html
eSI Visitor Programme
eSI runs a programme for visiting researchers. 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.
Further Information
For more information about any NeSC services, please check the NeSC web
site, or send an e–mail to: adminteam@nesc.ac.uk