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December 2009

Large Hadron Collider Grid: one year on

• The Large Hadron Collider may have experienced troubles over the last year, but CERN's Jamie Shiers tells us that things at CERN have been far from quiet.

News in Brief

• Mythology and sustainability, Successful Google Summer of Code, OMII-UK PALs: Hellos and Goodbyes, OGSA-DAI achieves new milestones, Big step forward for grid interoperability.

Software sustainability – together we’re stronger

• Neil Chue Hong, Director of OMII-UK, outlines OMII-UK's vision for ensuring software sustainability.

One giant leap for Taverna

• NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) created the first American satellite and are now using Taverna for their Web Services-based infrastructure

Crystal Structure Prediction and Condor – a match made in OMII-UK

• A group at UCL have a more reliable and versatile system than ever before for modelling drug characteristics thanks to a collaboration with OMII-UK.

Social simulation could help answer the difficult questions

• Social simulation might hold the key to answering difficult questions, such as 'where’s the best location in Oxford for a new hospital?'

The future of European grids

• EGEE's Danielle Venton discovers what the EGEE '09 delegates predict for the future of European grids.

OMII-UK principle investigator appointed e-Social Science National strategic Director

• Professor David De Roure, one of OMII-UK’s PIs, has been appointed to the new role of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) National Strategic Director of e-Social Science.

Shantenu Jha: it’s good to have PALs

• Shantenu Jha comments on his experience as an OMII-UK PAL.

OSCAR helps researchers by understanding chemistry

• We talk to the University of Cambridge's Peter Murray-Rust about his group's OSCAR software which is helping a number of prestigious organisation understand chemistry.

September 2009

Mobile pollution monitoring helps clear the air

• Jeremy Cohen from Imperial College London discusses new mobile pollution sensors that could lead to real-time pollution monitoring.

News in Brief

• OMII-UK’s OSCAR Workshop brings chemists together, New videos show e-Research in action, Diaser solves archiving problems, NGS Innovation Forum is magic! From strength to strength: GridSAM, Twitter!

Access Grid move into further education

• Access Grid's Katy Middlebrough discusses AG's attempt to open up the further education market.

Gain contributors, improve code and achieve sustainability

• We hear about the many benefits of open development from Ross Gardler, Manager at OSS Watch.

BioCatalogue: a curated catalogue of Web Services for the life sciences

• The BioCatalogue is set to help life scientists to locate and use Web Services. Franck Tanoh provides an overview of this phenomenally useful new tool.

A student’s view on the summer school

• Kristen Hardwick, one of the top summer school students, tells us about her experience of the International Summer School for Grid Computing (ISSGC).

Manchester eResearch Centre launch

• The University of Manchester is revitalising its e-social science research programme with the launch of the Manchester eResearch Centre.

EGEE develop grid-friendly MATLAB

• Researchers from disciplines as disparate as laser physics and finance, have a new computing tool at their fingertips: MATLAB can now run on the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) infrastructure.

ONIX a free online cancer-research portal

• A free, online, cancer-research portal, called ONIX, was launched at the end of August. The National Cancer Research Institute's Emma Rigby discusses how it could potentially improve prognosis and diagnosis of cancer.

New consortium to embed e-Research technology

• We hear from Anne Trefethen, the Director of e-Research South, about how the consortium will help to embed e-Research technologies in the research community.

Image credits

June 2009

Plenty more fish in the sea?

• Danielle Venton from EGEE describes AquaMaps, a new tool that uses EGEE resources to investigate declining fish stocks

News In Brief

• First OMII-UK Collaborations Workshop is a fantastic success, Grid Integration for Taverna, GridSAM's disaster scenario, BioCatalogue is launched, Grid Summer School 2009, OMII-UK aids new OGF standard.

OGSA-DAI moves into open development

• OGSA-DAI is evolving from an open-source product to an open-development project. Mike Jackson, the new technical lead on the OGSA-DAI project, describes what this change will mean for OGSA-DAI.

Open Source: the next generation

• Michael Micelli, one of last year's Google Summer of Code students, wrote some great new code for OMII-UK's SAGA software. We take a look at this code, and talk about our plans for this year's Google Summer of Code.

A better prognosis thanks to the sharing of genomic data

• Clinicians can now analyse large-scale and complex genetic data using Taverna and High Performance Computing. Mark Delderfield, from Microsoft Shared Genomics, describes how this new system works.

Massive Growth in Chinese freight needs a grid solution

• By 2010, China aims to move 280,000 freight cars on its railways each day. Yan Zhang, a student currently studying at the University of Vienna, is working to provide a grid solution for dealing with the vast amount of data that will be generated.

Interoperation takes a step forward

• A new community group - the Grid Interoperation Now Community Group - looks at what is needed to enable e-Science applications.

The cancer BioInformatics Grid chooses Taverna

• There is currently no way in which cancer researchers can easily share their research. The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, which uses Taverna, aims to rectify this problem.

Cardiology will pump the deep web

• The Deep Web is the name given to three quarters of the Web which is inaccessible to most users. A new application CardioSHARE has been designed to expose Deep Web data to cardiologists.

Rapid portlets are a hit with chemists

• Chemists at the universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews have shown that OMII-UK's Rapid software makes it easy to develop portlets. They have developed portlets that are now used for teaching over 140 students.

A SLiM chance for viruses

• Viruses have evolved a clever way of reproducing. In collaboration with the Engage project, a research group in the University of Southampton are looking to understand viruses so that they can develop better cures.

March 2009

Copying and clouds

• CFL Software have developed popular anti-copying software, which they are now extending using cloud computing.

News In Brief

• New funding for OMII-UK, Help us develop e-Research software, Jim Gray award for Carole Goble, e-Science the changing landscape and Data intergration in the life sciences.

New Taverna Release

• The new Taverna workflow engine (version 2.0) has been released.

Bringing order to service assembly

• An overview of Service Component Architecture and Apache Tuscany.

Engage provides a picture of the UK's e-Research community

• Steve Brewer provides discusses the next stage of the Engage project, which has interviewed over fifty researchers to compile a picture of their e-Research needs.

Making climate modelling accessible

• The Aladin2 Engage project will make climate modelling systems available to a wide range of scientists and the general public.

Radiotherapy to become more accurate

• The MCTP Engage project will make radiotherapy dose-planning calculations more cost effective, which will significantly increase the accessibility of this treatment.

A view on ancient documents

• The eSAD Engage project will use imaging techniques to increase access to ancient documents.

EPSRC focuses on the future of UK e-Science

• The EPSRC are looking for a panel of experts to review UK e-Science, which will help mould the future of future e-Science funding.

Repositories and the grid come together

• A workshop series has set out to explore the interfaces between grid- and repository-based architectures.

Grid technology for collaborative ontology development

• The far-reaching impact of the Gene Ontology (GO) shows the important role a shared conceptual view of the biological world can have on data interpretation in the life sciences.

OGF help IT to reduce carbon emissions

• OGF are looking for solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of IT.

A brand new OGSA-DAI

• Mario Antonioletti describes the improved features of the latest OGSA_DAI release.

December 2008

Truly open-source science

• The future of the paper log book looks dim. Cameron Neylon discusses the alternative: Open Notebook science.

A web of human relationships

• Viewing e-Research projects as a web of human relationships gives Dimitriana Spencer special insight into the way these projects work.

News in brief

• Taverna success at ISMB, Award for Taverna-caBIG, NCeSS call for papers, Summer of code, New software and Have your say!

UK e-Researchers aid efforts to understand climate change

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change benefits from experience gained by an OMII-UK project.

Linking up the ancients

• Textual material from Ancient Greece and Rome is being made easily available by OGSA-DAI.

New development for GridSAM

• The GridSAM project achieves a great leap forward thanks to a collaboration between OMII-UK, ICT and Imperial College London.

OGSA-DAI based data integration projects at AIST

• AIST puts OGSA-DAI to use in a number of projects.

Collaborative visualisation with RAVE

• Got data but can't visualise it? Try RAVE, the new visualisation software from OMII-UK.

Boost for e-Social Science (and obesity) with launch of new NCeSS nodes

• June Finch gives us a tour of the new NCeSS research projects, which will soon be aiding research in subjects such as obesity and social science data management.

myExperiment supports Microsoft Trident

• New functionality is added to Taverna to help oceanography research.

How the UK established a thriving e-Science community

• We hear from Malcolm Atkinson, Paul Watson, John Brooke and Anne Trefethen about the success of the UK e-Science Programme and the regional e-Science centres.

September 2008

CERN and sustainability

• LHC Grid's Jamie Shiers discusses the sustainability challenges facing the Large Hadron Collider.

We are farmers, not hunter gatherers

• OMII-UK's Director, Neil CHue Hong, takes a look at the position that OMII-UK plays in the sustainability problem.

News in Brief

• A look at Taverna 2.0, the International Grid Summer School, OMII-UK's collaboration with ICT and Neil Chue Hong's appearance on the BBC World Service.

Step up for an iPod!

• Win an iPod at the AHM 2008.

Grid computing made Rapid

• Rapid is a new system for quickly and easily joining up disparate resources and creating a user interface.

Making the Grid invisible

• Open GRid Shell (OGRSH) make grids easier to use by exploiting a paradigm already familiar to most users: the file system.

Bioinformatics, e-Science and the Grid: a symbiotic relationship

• As the first in a series of articles focusing on different aspects of e-Research, we asked myGrid’s Katy Wolstencroft for a précis on Bioinformatics.

GSoC students make significant contributions to OMII-UK software

• OMII-UK’s first year as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code has led to a number of improvements in OMII-UK's software.

Meeting the Audi challenge

• At a recent workshop hosted by Audi, IT Innovation demonstrated to major automotive companies and technology suppliers how GRIA and OGSA-DAI can help support collaborative product design.

Expert advice on open source

• OSS Watch is a JISC-funded advisory service that can answer your questions on the use of open-source software, its distribution and development.

Uptake of e-Infrastructure

• Investment in UK e-Infrastructure services has helped to build computing and data resources that underpin a wide range of research activities. Increasing the uptake of these services even further is the task of the e-Uptake project.

Applying grid technologies to the business world

• The BEinGRID (Business Experiments in Grid) project is funded by the European Commission to develop components that meet the business needs of Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) across Europe.

e-Research opens up nineteenth-century texts

• The latest e-Research techniques are being applied to help scholars find materials within the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (NCSE).

June 2008

Access Grid learns to dance

• Access Grid finds a new use in the performing arts.

Making Access Grid easy

• Portlet Access Grid overcomes Access Grid's accessibility problems.

News in brief

• The big issues facing e-Research, ADMIRE project, OGSA-DAI for UNICORE and gLite, Facelift fo the OMII-UK website and Google Summer of Code 2008.

Application-driven development improves OGSA-DAI

• First success of OGSA-DAI's application-driven development project.

T-Rex roars into life

• T-Rex plug-in allows Taverna to separate the design and execution of workflows.

New users attracted by NGS roadshow

• NGS Roadshow brings in a crowd at the University of Southampton.

Cancer experts choose Taverna

• caBIG project choose Taverna for its ease of use and extend it to GT4.

OMII-SAGA: a simple programming interface for e-Researchers

• The need for application-level abstractions that provide the functionality needed to access and coordinate distributed computational resources is fulfilled by OMII-SAGA.

OMII-Europe’s ‘bridges’ help the fight against malaria

• OMII-Europe rescue scientists from their 'Grid-Islands' and in the process accelerate research into a cure for malaria.

New portlets for transparent access and manipulation of databases

• New OGSA-DAI portlets make data access, data management and data integration easier.

Users help to improve e-Research

• The Engage project begins to reap results.

An e-Infrastructure for Geosciences

• The GEO Grid project aims to solve global-scale problems, such as environmental conservation, resource exploration and natural disaster prevention.