DEGISCO Project meeting

13-15 June 2011

The W-GRASS team and the Centre for Parallel computing is organising the next DEGISCO European project meeting at the University of Westminter. Details of the meeting can be found here.

EGI User Forum 2011

11-14 April, Vilnius, Lithuania

The W-Grass team is involved in several presentations, tutorials and demonstrations during the 2011 EGI User Forum that takes place in Vilnius, Lithuania between 11 and 14 April 2011. The W-Grass related sessions are the following:

Multi-workflow systems interoperability: the SHIWA platform, Workshop, 11-Apr-2011, 14:00, handouts available here.

Coarse Grained Interoperability of Heterogeneous Grid Workflow Systems, presentation, 12-Apr-2011, 17:00

Utilising Desktop Grid resources through gLite, demonstration, 12-Apr-2011, all day

VisIVO, visualization in different grid environments, from gLite to Desktop Grid, presentation, 13-Apr-2011, 14:30

IDGF workshop at EGI-UF on Desktop Grids for scientific applications, workshop, 14-Apr-2011, 11:00

Integration, sharing and exploitation of national and international e-Infrastructures, presentation, 14-Apr-2011, 15:00

University harnesses power of idle PCs and saves millions - Press release

CloudPro has published an article titled University harnesses power of idle PCs and saves millions reporting on the launch of the University of Westminster Local Desktop Grid. "A London university claims it will save millions of pounds by harnessing the spare capacity in idle teaching lab’ PC instead of buying new supercomputers, in a move which is being hailed as an example to organisations worldwide."

EDGI Application Porting lecture and Tutorial

ISGC 2011,19-25 March 2011, Taipei, Taiwan

Tamas Kiss will give a talk on Porting applications to a Distributed Computing Infrastucture incorporating Desktop Grids during the ISGC 2011 conference on Tuesday March 22 at Taipei, Taiwan. An IDGF (International Desktop Grid Federation) tutorial will be held on the same event on Monday March 21. Tutorial handouts are available here.

EDGI Application Porting Presentations at AMC and the Amsterdam Science Park

2-3 February, 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Tamas Kiss visits the e-Bioscience group of the AMC (Academic Medical Centre) in Amsterdam on February 2-3 on behalf of the W-GRASS team and the EDGI project for collaboration on Desktop Grid computing. He presents talks at the AMC and at the Amsterdam Science Park. For more details please click here

NGS Innovation Forum 2010

23-24 November, 2010, Didcot, Oxford, UK

Stephen Winter gave a presentation on behalf of the Centre for Parallel Computing and W-GRASS teams on the NGS Innovation Forum on 24th November 2010 at Didcot, near Oxford. Noam Weingarten presented the W-GRASS poster on the same event titled Project RNAP. The poster describes the collaboration of researhers from Imperial College and the University of Westminter to create a grid-based workflow to model the behavior of RNA Polimerases.

EGI Technical Forum 2010

14-17 September 2010, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The W-GRASS team contributed with presentations and tutorials to the EGI Technical forum concentrating on its desktop grid related application porting activities. The team organised and contributed to the following two sessions:

Supporting EGI user communities with Desktop Grid resources

Using Desktop Grids in an eScience environment

PUCOWO '10

1st P-GRADE Portal User Community Workshop, 10-11 June 2010, Zurich, Switzerland

There will be three presentations by Tamas Kiss related to W-GRASS activities during the 1st P-GRADE Portal User Community Workshop.

Thursday, 10th June, 16.40 - 17.00: Tamas Kiss, Gabor Terstyanszky, Noam Weingarten, Zsolt Lichtenberger: Using the WS-PGRADE Portal in the ProSim Project

Friday, 11th June, 8.40 - 9.00: Tamas Kiss, Tamas Kukla, Gabor Terstyanszky: P-GRADE portal extensions for UK NGS users

Friday, 11th June, 9.40 - 10.00: Tamas Kiss, Gabor Terstyanszky, Zsolt Lichtenberger, Christopher Reynolds: Rendering Portal Service for the Blender User Community

W-GRASS at AHM'09

7th-9th December 2009, Oxford, UK

The W-GRASS team will have several presentations and demonstrations during the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting AHM'09 at Oxford. Here are some details:

• Tuesday, 8th December, 11.30-12.30, Session on Medical and Biological Sciences: Parameter Sweep Workflows for Modelling Carbohydrate Recognition, presentation by Gabor Terstyanszky
• Tuesday, 8th December, 15.00-15.30, OMII booth, Protein Molecule Simulation on NGS, demonstration by Gabor Terstyanszky
• Un-scheduled on-demand demonstrations on the NGS Booth on Tuesday and Wednesday (8th-9th December).

Temporary shut-down of the Rendering Rortal

December 2, 2009

The portal developer team at the University of Westminster would like to thank everybody who tried and gave valuable feedback about our Rendering Portalservice during the past year. We have learned a lot from this feedback and have decided to make significant enhancements to the portal. Therefore, we regret to announce that services on the Rendering Portal have been temporarily restricted for upgrades and maintenance. While no new jobs can be submitted right now, users can still log in and download their files. We will come back with an even better free service in the New Year. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any comments, suggestions or questions. Our e-mail address at rendering@lists.cpc.wmin.ac.uk will still be active during the downtime. Hope to see you all on our enhanced service soon!

Usage Statistics for the Rendering Portal

30th September 2009

It has been more than half a year ago that the W-GRASS team set up the Rendering Portal We have monitored the usage of the portal during this six months period. Here are some statistics:

We had nearly 1200 registered users submitting nearly 9000 workflows and more than 464,000 frames to be rendered. The total rendering time used on the portal was 28,000 hours (or 1167 days). Users have uploaded approximately 95 GBytes of input files and downloaded 180 GBytes of results.

EGEE'09 Conference

21-25 September 2009, Barcelona, Spain

Several W-GRASS related presentations and demonstrations are shown during the EGEE'09 Conference in Barcelona. These include demonstrations related to the ProSim Project on the UKIF Booth, and presentations and demonstrations related to application porting activities within the European EDGeS project (see details here, here and here).

Advanced Distributed Services Summer School

7th - 11th September 2009, Coseners House, near Oxford

Tamas Kiss gives a lecture and tutorial on how to use the NGS P-GRADE portal during ADSS 09 in Abingdon on Thursday, 10th September.

Leaping Hurdles: Planning IT Provision for Researchers

18 Jun 2009, The Franklin Theatre at the Institute of Physics, London

Pamela Greenwell and Tamas Kiss gives a demonstration presenting the results of the JISC/ENGAGE funded ProSim project during the Leaping Hurdles event that showcases the lessons learned from several JISC community engagement and virtual research environment projects. A poster presented on the event can be found here.

Grid Competition for Biotech companies

Closing date: 26 June 2009

The W-GRASS team, in collaboration with the School of Biosciences, University of Westminster, runs a competition for Biotech companies to win free access to high-speed grid computing services. Read more about the competition here.

Joint EDGeS and EGEE Summer School on Grid Application Support

Budapest, Hungary, 29 June - 4 July 2009

The W-GRASS team gives several lectures and tutorials during the Joint EDGeS and EGEE Summer School in Budapest. The focus of the summer school is to give insights into Service and Desktop Grid related technologies, such as gLite, BOINC, XtremWeb and EDGeS, as well as to tools and programming environments by which users can develop and run applications on this enhanced grid infrastructure.

W-GRASS on INGRID 2009

April 1-3, Alghero, Sardinia, Italy

Tamas Kiss presents a paper titled "Porting Applications to a Combined Desktop Grid/Service Grid platform using the EDGeS Application Development Methodology" during the INGRID 2009 workshop. The paper describes the experiences of two applications ported to the grid by W-GRASS.

Modelling protein-carbohydrate recognition in-silico

April 20th-April 24th 2009

Workshop Organised by the School of Biosciences in collaboration with the Centre for Parallel Computing at the University of Westminster

To be held at: New Cavendish Campus, University of Westminster, London, UK

For more details please visit the Workshop Website.

2nd EDGeS training Grid workshop - XtremWeb

17-18 February 2009

Orsay - France

The 2nd EDGeS Grid training workshop will concentrate on XtremWeb. XtremWeb is a general Desktop grid platform that can be used to set up both private Grids in an organisation and public, volunteer Desktop grids.

The 2nd EDGeS Grid training workshop is targeted at people who want to install and operate an XtremWeb desktop Grid (especially day 1); and application developers that want to develop parallel Grid applications or want to port applications to an XtremWeb based Grid.

More information on the 2nd EDGeS Grid training workshop Website

ProSim Project/JISC Engage Program

October 2008 - March 2009

The W-GRASS team in collaboration with researchers from the School of Biosciences of University of Westminster have been funded by the JISC Engage Program to develop a framework providing seamless access to Grid resources and services for bio-scientists to run protein molecule simulations on the National Grid Service.

For more information please visit the ProSim Project Website.

SC'08 - International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

15-21 November 2008, Austin, Texas, USA

The W-GRASS and Centre for Parallel Computing team will be present with several demonstrations on this year's Supercomputing Conference. The demonstrations are focusing on the interoperation of Grid compute and storage resources, the interoperability of various Grid workflow solutions including Taverna, Triana, Kepler and P-GRADE, and will also showcase applications ported to the Grid by W-GRASS. You can find more information about the demos here.

1st EDGeS Grid training workshop

27-28 November 2008, Almere, The Netherlands

W-GRASS is the major contributor to a two day training courseon porting applications to the EDGeS infrastructure. The afternoon of the first day a Masterclass addresses the porting of applications to Desktop Grids and Service Grids. This masterclass is given by Tamas Kiss, from the Centre for Parallel Computing University of Westminster, who is responsible for application development and porting in the EDGeS project. The second day, delivered by Gabor Szmetanko from the Centre for Parallel Computing, is of a more practical nature: it provides hands-on training in porting applications to the Grid.

W-GRASS User Presentation on the NGS Innovation Forum

4th-5th November 2008, MoSI, Manchester - UK

Pamela Greenwell, School of Biosciences University of Westminster, has been invited to the NGS Innovation Forum to give a presentation on her experiences in using Grid technologies in biomolecular research. The talk, titled Grid Molecular Modeling, focuses on the Autodock based simulations that were ported to the Grid by W-GRASS.

EGEE'08 Conference

22-26 September 2008, Istambul - Turkey

Tamas Kiss gave a presentation on application porting and user support within the framework of the European EDGeS project. The presentation can be downloaded from here.

Better Networks for Better Health Event, WestFocus

12 June 2008, University of Westminster

Working to translate research into patient care & community health

Posters:

Docking and Molecular Dynamics Simulations on a Grid Computing Platform

Hans Heindl, Noam Weingarten, Babak Afrough, Pamela Greenwell and Tamas Kiss

University of Westminster, School of Biosciences and School of Informatics

Download poster

A Grid Computing Implementation for Profiling Hospitals Based on Patient Readmissions

Thierry Chaussalet, Eren Demir, Noam Weingarten, Steve Winter

University of Westminster, School of Informatics

Download poster