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Mythology and sustainability: watch the lecture online

If a future for software is not secured, the time and money invested in its development is wasted. With this level of importance placed on software sustainability, it is no surprise that a number of myths have sprung up around how to achieve it.

On 29 October 2009, Neil Chue Hong, the Director of OMII-UK, presented a public lecture 'Software Sustainability: Looking Past the Myths', at the e-Science Institute. In the lecture, Neil discussed OMII-UK's long history of working with projects from the UK research community, achieving software sustainability and participating in sustainable projects. After discussing the misconceptions that led to the sustainability myths, Neil described OMII-UK's route for achieving software sustainability through engagement with the research community.

The lecture was webcast live and is now available on the OMII-UK website (see link below).

http://www.tinyurl.com/yat4f7a

Successful Google Summer of Code

For the second year running, OMII-UK participated in the Google Summer of Code. The programme provides a number of places funded by Google for students to work on open-source projects over a thirteen-week period. OMII-UK mentored mentored five students who worked on: OGSA-DAI/DQP, an OGSA-DAI JDBC driver, providing Rapid with access to cloud infrastructure, continuing work on SAGA’s MapReduce implementation, and providing SAGA with access to Cloud instances.

All of the students successfully completed their projects and we, once again, thank Google for providing us with the opportunity to mentor some of the future’s brightest new developers.

http://www.tinyurl.com/yez2rqk

OMII-UK PALs: Hellos and Goodbyes

The OMII-UK PALs Programme provides a number of key individuals who act as ambassadors for OMII-UK. They spread the word on OMII-UK products and services within their own specialist discipline.

This year, we said goodbye to two of our PALs: Chris Higgins and Matthew Pocock. We would like to thank them for their contributions during their tenures as OMII-UK PALs.

We also welcomed two new PALs, Shantenu Jha and Jeremy Cohen, who will join our other existing PALs: Marco Roos, Isao Kojima, Mark Wilkinson and Ravi Madduri.

http://www.tinyurl.com/yho2sbp

OGSA-DAI achieves new milestones

OGSA-DAI has effectively completed the migration of its infrastructure to SourceForge. The main aim of this effort was to make it possible for more people to contribute and become engaged with OGSA-DAI, thus ensuring the long-term sustainability of the product.

All of the OGSA-DAI/DQP source code now resides in a SourceForge SVN repository. The code layout has been re-factored to make it easier to build releases. Extensive documentation on the use of the SourceForge facilities can be found in an associated TRAC wiki, which is also hosted at SourceForge.

October also saw a new milestone release of OGSA-DAI, version 3.2, which now bundles the Distributed Query Processing (DQP) capabilities that were previously released as a separate product.

http://www.tinyurl.com/yhqa5xh

Big step forward for grid interoperability

Interoperability is a huge challenge in grid computing that, if addressed, has the potential to yield great rewards for science.

E-Researchers who can harness more compute and data resources will be able to solve scientific problems more quickly than those who cannot. Interoperability through open standards provides the key to unlock access to those resources.

OMII-UK has developed a demonstrator that solves a real-world problem from the field of plasma physics. The demonstrator harnesses interoperability across a number of UK and European Grid middleware deployments, and was presented at OGF27 and SuperComputing ‘09.

A flash version of the demonstrator can be viewed on the OMII-UK website (see link below).

http://www.tinyurl.com/yhdrzo8