Our colleagues at OMII-UK have recently launched the OMII-UK YouTube channel which lets you view the latest software demonstrations and videos from their staff and collaborators.

The channel will be grown over the next few months but currently it contains software demonstrations of Campus Grid Toolkit, Middleware interoperation, OSCAR, Rapid and JSDL Applications Repository. However it's not all demonstrations as they also have videos showing the sustainability lecture recently presented at NeSc in Edinburgh by Neil Chue Hong (OMII-UK's Director) and interviews with OMII-UK's PIs and some of their partners.

The OMII-UK collaboration workshop will take place in Edinburgh this week so look out for blog posts from the various NGS staff attending including myself.

Globus is one of the most prevalent middlewares in use for Grid computing and is used extensively in the NGS. GlobusWorld is the main shindig for globus developers and users to share their experiences of the software. This year's GlobusWorld is being held at Argonne National Laboratory, on the outskirts of Chicago.

The NGS presentation on "Authentication in the NGS" went down well with interest in MEG and the Certificate Wizard. It was also interesting to find out that GSI-SSHTerm is now embedded into the US Teragrid portal.

Certificate ease of use issues were echoed by other institutions who all seemed to be doing their own integration of identity provider and grid software so users can use their institutional credentials to get short-lived certificates.

There have also been many interesting talks about the latest advances in globus-related Middleware, in particular version 5 of the Globus Toolkit (gt5) and their cloud-like service globus.org.

Tomorrow is the final day of the conference with tutorial sessions on the Globus Toolkit and globus.org.

Further information on the above NGS tools/services can be found under Use the NGS / User Tools on the NGS Web site.

So two NGS roadshows last week down south and both went very well! It's always nice to see our users present their work as it's the best way to really find out what you are all up to out there! Quite often the research presented is literally hot off the machine so the roadshow audiences are getting a truly up to the minute view of research being performed on the NGS.

As the liaison officer it's my job to let the world know what the NGS and it's users are up to so we can advertise your research and our resources through a wide variety of publications, events etc. We have recently had some of our users research featured in SCW (the role of geographic isolation and dispersal limitation in generating high endemic plant species diversity) and in iSGTW in an article on "Supporting the arts and humanities with e-science".

We also feature our users research on our website in our case studies section, posters, research papers etc. If you have anything you would like added into these sections (particularly the research paper section) then please contact me at support@grid-support(dot)ac(dot)uk.

There is one term that you really can't avoid in Grid computing - as much as you might want to.

It is the M-word - Middleware - a term that apparently dates back to the late 60s and has been gathering new definitions ever since.

As far as the current work of the NGS is concerned, Middleware is the software that you install on an existing computer system to hook it into the grid.

For sites associated with GridPP project, this software is gLite.

If you are outside GridPP and do not wish to use gLite, we currently recommend packages from the Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT). VDT is a project from the US Open Science Grid to collect together and package as much grid software as practical. There are more than enough packaged applications within VDT to get an NGS affiliate site on the grid.

Full NGS partners - who might need something gLite-like and capable of supporting many virtual organisations - can extend VDT with another set of seemingly random letters LCAS/LCMAPS (Local Centre Authorisation Service/ Local Credential Mapping Service).

To simplify the job of selecting the relevant packages from VDT, and building LCAS/LCMAPS - NGS staff have developed the 'NGS VDT Installer scripts'. These are maintained via the National eScience Centre's NeSCForge service (http://forge.ngs.ac.uk/projects/ngs)

The scripts started as a way of collating and documenting the knowledge of NGS operations staff.

Three years ago, the original NGS 'core' sites at RAL (STFC), Oxford, Manchester and Leeds had all deployed VDT but had set the service up independently.

So we got together, agreed on what packages were needed, how they should be configured and what local tweaks needed to make things work. Rather than simply documenting this information, we turned it into a set of executable scripts - the 'NGS VDT Installer' scripts - which could produce a consistent VDT-based service on a host.

The scripts can be thought of as runnable documentation. Someone who needed to reproduce a standard NGS installation could either run the script or read it as a guide to what to do.

More recently, following work done at Manchester, we scripted the process to building LCAS/LCMAPS. There is now a set of scripts that can take a site to full NGS partner status.

Maintaining and developing the installer scripts is one of the jobs of the NGS research and development group and we released the latest version last Friday.

Bug reports permitting, this will be the last of this generation of install scripts.

So where do we go from here?

That depends on what happens to the M-word over the next few months.

We do know VDT is still being developed. We also know there are plans to produce a pan-european Unified Middleware Distribution incorporating gLite.

Whatever happens, we'll be watching.

Tomorrow sees three NGS staff head way south to Canterbury for a NGS roadshow event which will be held at Christ Church Canterbury University or CCCU for short!

As well as the usual NGS staff in attendance we will also have two NGS users who will be speaking about their research using the NGS. Paul Townend from the University of Leeds will be speaking about the use of NGS in the social sciences while Sulman Sarwar will be speaking about the use of NGS in the humanities. It should be a very interesting event and something slightly different!

Meanwhile if you would like to see the presentations from our last roadshow event which was held at the University of Hull these are now available on the event website.

And coincidentally some social science research using NGS resources was mentioned in this recent iSGTW article entitled "Supporting the arts and humanities with e-science".

If so then have a look at the new job opportunities advertised from the recently created European Grid Initiative (EGI). The EGI organisation is being developed to coordinate the European Grid Infrastructure, based on the federation of individual National Grid Infrastructures, to support a multi-disciplinary user community.

The jobs appear to be based in Amsterdam and include technology and operation officers, dissemination roles and much more. Details of all the roles can be found in the jobs section of the EGI website.

Last years UK All Hands Meeting is still fresh in the minds of many people but we're now beginning to look ahead to this years.

The AHM has been moved back to its traditional slot of September and will be held in Cardiff from the 13th - 15th - a week when every other conference also seems to be on judging by my inbox!

The call is however out now for workshops for this event and all the relevant information is on the new AHM website.

The goal of the NGS is to deliver a production quality national e-infrastructure in support of academic research. This is stated on the website and mentioned at the roadshows.

Technology moves on and what constitutes a production quality national e-infrastructure changes.

The task of keeping up with the Globuses is the responsibility of the NGS Research and Development group. This is the first of a series of postings from Research and Development describing what we do.

Let us introduce ourselves: we are a group of people from STFC, Oxford, Leeds, Edinburgh and Manchester. We typically meet by acccess grid once a week and it is our job to evaluate and develop new services. These services may be suggested by people within the group or suggested by our colleagues in the Operations or Partnership.

The services we are working on can be broadly classified as...

Advanced Reservation

To provide ways of booking time on one or more sites

Middleware deployment

Simplifying and documenting the installation of the software needed to join a grid.

User facing services

Services intended to make life easier for end users

Data access

Ways of getting the data you want where you want it to be.

Cloud computing

Computing on demand.

If you want to know more, keep watching the blog for future R+D postings.

From looking at the user case studies available on the NGS Communities site, there are a large number of NGS users using NGS resources for simulations. As the outreach person at the NGS I'd like to showcase these simulations on our website to demonstrate the type of research taking place on the NGS.

At the moment there are only a few simulations up from Dr Zhongwei Guan who is researching into the impact / blast behaviour of fibre metal laminates. I would love to see more simulations available from other research areas so if you have a short video clip of your research that would fit into this section then please let me know! You can email the file to me at gillian(dot)sinclair(at)manchester(dot)ac(dot)uk.

In conjunction with the Scottish Bioinformatics Forum, the NGS is running a one day training event at NeSC in Edinburgh in March and the event is open to all.

The course will cover accessing the facilities of the NGS to run high through put applications across multiple nodes for bioinformatics. Attendees will launch jobs using command line and GUI interfaces and use some of the pre-installed bioinformatics applications available from the NGS nodes. Also included will be a short introduction to the practicalities of translating bioinformatics formats between XML formats.

If you would like to attend this event then please see the event page on the NeSC website. Remember you don't have to be a SBF member to attend or indeed Scottish!

There have been some new additions to the NGS website over the last week or so - mainly news stories but hopefully of interest to you all!

Karl Bateman, a NGS user from the University of Manchester, had his research featured as the headline article on iSGTW recently. Karl is researching into how dinosaurs moved, in particular the dinosaur Acrocanthosaurus atokensis which is essentially the same size as a T-Rex. The full article entitled "Answering a truly big question: how did dinosaurs move?" is available on the iSGTW website.

Another article currently featured on the NGS home page refers to the Certificate wizard which has been recently developed by Jens Jensen at the NGS. Basically the article explains how we are making it easier for you to look after your grid certificate!

We also have a new poll on the NGS home page. We'd like to find out who funds the people that visit our website. So if you have a spare second please tick the appropriate box on the front page! You'll find the poll on the home page just below the NGS load monitor. This will give us an indication of who our visitors are funded by.

Yesterday NGS staff from the length and breadth of the country headed to the University of Hull to hold a NGS roadshow event.

Our local host was Dr Helen Wright from the SimVis Research Group in the Department of Computer Science. Helen also looks after HIVE which is the Hull Immersive Visualization Environment. Helen had done a great job of getting everyone to attend the event with the result that we had a full house.

Our invited NGS user presenters were Clive Davenhall from NeSC who talked about the nano-CMOS project and Srikanth Nagella from STFC RAL who spoke about the RAL visualisation cluster that is now part of the NGS. As well as our NGS users, there were also presentations from our technical director Dr David Wallom and Dr David Fergusson who co-ordinates training activities for the NGS. All the presentations were very well received and a lot of positive feedback was received.

We had also taken along our Roaming RA service in the form of Shiv Kaushal who is based at the University of Leeds. Not all institutions currently have a RA Operator who can distrbute grid certificates so we tend to take along a Roaming RA operater with us when we visit one of these places. Shiv was slightly overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted grid certificates at the end of the event and he spent lunchtime dealing with quite a long queue!

All in all it was a very successful event and we're now looking forward to the next one which will take place at Canterbury Christ Church University. This event will incorporate some hands on training and is open to everyone from any institute. If you would like to attend this event then please register!

A warm Barev (welcome) to Arsen Hayrapetyan from ArmeSFo, the Armenian e-Science Foundation. He is visiting RAL for two months to work on CA software, a visit funded by NATO's Science for Peace and Security programme. The aim is to develop CA software for "NATO partners and mediterranean dialogue countries."

The main raison d'être for the certificate infrastructure is that our certificates are trusted all over the world - they provide a sufficiently high level of assurance. All grid and e-Science CAs in the world are united in the International Grid Trust Federation, which encourages trust and collaborations between national CAs. With the software developed by Arsen, we can expand this collaboration to new countries, such as Georgia, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, to enable and encourage further collaborations between scientists.

We're running a couple of NGS roadshows this month with the first one taking place this Thursday in Hull. This one is fully booked but we do have another event at Canterbury Christ Church University on the 25th which is open to everyone and also includes a training event so if you want some hands on training of using the NGS, sign up!

David Fergusson who looks after training for the NGS is also taking part in a JISC new technologies event at Liverpool John Moores University on the 19th of February where you can hear about the NGS as well as other infrastructure and Web 2.0 services from JISC.

Both of these events are free to attend but registration is required.

Things have been pretty hectic in the outreach and training department over the last week or so and it's going to get worse!

We've got quite a few roadshow events coming up at either end of the country. Next week we're off to the University of Hull to run an event which is now almost fully booked. This will be held in Hull's visualisation suite so it made sense to have a presentation about the visualisation resources available from the NGS at this event. If you would like to see the agenda for this event then please visit the event page for the Hull roadshow.

After that we are off to Canterbury Christ Church university at the end of the month to run a roadshow event incorporating a training session as well. This event is open to anyone but places on the training session are already very limited so register quick if you would like to attend! Christ Church university is slightly different from the universities that we usually visit as they have a very strong focus on the arts, humanities and social sciences. The NGS user presentations at this event hopefully reflect this. If you would like to attend this event then visit the event page for the Canterbury Christ Church University roadshow.

The day after we are then off to the University of Surrey to again take part in a roadshow with a difference as this event will have a distinct "cloud" focus. The roadshow will take place in conjunction with Dr Lee Gillam who is undertaking a JISC funded study on "Using cloud computing for research". More information about this event can be found at the event page for the University of Surrey roadshow.

Last Friday many of the NGS staff were up at NeSC in Edinburgh to discuss communications and the new NGS website. It reminded me that I haven't posted on here for a while about the various outreach methods we have here at the NGS so here is a small reminder!

NGS blog - obviously! This is syndicated to the front page of the new NGS website - you can see the tab in the text box in top right. It's also syndicated to the GridPP and iSGTW websites.

NGS website - which has recently been revamped. We don't see the website as a static entity and we are constantly responding to feedback and making the site even better for you to use. If you have any feedback about the new website then please let us know through the helpdesk.

NGS email lists - we have 2 of these. We have the news list through which all subscribers receive a fortnightly email bulletin full of news from the NGS and occasionally further afield. It also contains details of upcoming conferences and training events. We have over 720 subscribers to this service. All active NGS users are strongly advised to sign up to our status list which sends out notices about service levels, problems and downtime.

NGS newsletter - we produce a quarterly newsletter which features longer and more indepth articles about the NGS as well as features on new technology coming soon. It's also an opportunity to introduce users to NGS staff and NGS sites. The newsletter is distributed in hard copy at NGS events such as roadshows and conferences and is also available as a pdf from our website.

We also have a NGS Facebook group where the occasional photo of the NGS team in action pops up and also our Twitter account. If you have any more ideas on how the NGS can reach out to it's users then we would love to hear them.

Nothing to do with skiing or snowboarding I'm afraid but instead this is an online grid school!

The International Winter School in Grid Computing 2010 (IWSGC'10) will be held from the 1st of March until the 2nd of April 2010 and is now calling for participants.

IWSGC’10 will bring together world experts and enthusiastic students. It will be delivered fully online: participants will be able to attend the School without losing time and money on travelling. It will examine the conceptual and practical underpinnings of today's grids. Experts will provide exciting practical exercises, discuss the challenges of building and sustaining e-Infrastructure, report its rapid influence on the way we research, design and make decisions. They will share their vision of the developments and challenges ahead.

The deadline for applications closes on the 31st of January 2010. Please see the event website for more information.

TeraGrid have announced that applications for time on their system closes on the 15th of January. Although the call states that the applications are open to scientists, engineers and other US researchers, it may be of interest to NGS users who collaborate with colleagues in the US.

More details about the call can be found on the TeraGrid website.

The NGS will shortly be running another RA Operator training course at STFC RAL. Participation in the course will allow participants to be able to distribute and manage certificates at their institution so if you don't currently have someone at your institution who can fulfill this role, then this is the ideal opportunity to nominate a RA!

The training course is free to attend, lasts a few hours and we even give you lunch!

Full details about the course and how to register are available on the NGS website.