Welcome and introduction Room: IT 407 <p> This talk gives an overview of the week's aims, providing a roadmap of the event. This is as follows: </p> <p> e-science is concerned with how resources such as compute power and data can be orchestrated by a researcher, or their collaboration, to achieve research goals more easily, more quickly and more powerfully. A rich ecosystem of technologies exists to support e-science. The week intrdouces these from the viewpoint fo the researcher. Each day introduces different technologies and infrastructures that expand the scope of this orchestration: <ul> <li>Day 1 introduces concepts, and then uses Taverna to show how workflows can be constructed, so many computational steps can be orchestrated to build a complex analysis. <li>Day 2 pursues the theme of workflow, expanding the scope of orchestration to include web services. The MyGrid project uses Taverna to build workflows from unsecured web services exposed on the internet. <li>Day 3 begins to explore e-science at the UK scale - The National Grid Service is an infrastructure for researchers who collaborate across UK organisations, or who need additional resources above and beyond those accessible in their own institute. <li> Day 4 focuses upon data services on the NGS. It addresses the question: "I know I can access diverse compute resources on the NGS, but how do I manage, share and access data?" <li> Day 5 takes an international view - it outlines the infrastructure available for those who are collaborating in international research. </ul>

Introduction to e-science concepts Room: IT 407 <p>"e-science" is enhanced science: research that is carried out by collaborations enabled by the Internet, and using dynamically orchestrated resources, for example of data and compute-power. These resources may be within a University, in institutes within a country, or be international. </p>

Case studies introducing successful eScience projects

• Paul Fisher (The University of Manchester)
• Georgina Moulton (The University of Manchester)
• Katy Wolstencroft (The University of Manchester, myGrid Team)

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A Dictionary of Terms for Taverna

• Georgina Moulton (The University of Manchester)

Room: IT 407 <a href="http://taverna.sourceforge.net/"> Taverna</a> allows a biologist or bioinformatician with limited computing background and limited technical resources and support to construct highly complex analyses over public and private data and computational resources, all from a standard PC, UNIX box or Apple computer. With a combination of case studies, talks and practicals the concepts of building workflows with Taverna will be presented.

Basic Features in Taverna - A Practical Continued Room: IT 407

Discussion Room: IT 407 A chance for participants to discuss the relevance of the NGS services to their own research interests

Introduction to day 2 Room: IT 407 Today builds on yesterdays introduction to workflow, and introduces web services that permit distributed processing, before showing how <a href="http://www.mygrid.org.uk/">MyGrid</a> uses Taverna to orchestrate web services.

Advanced Features of Taverna

• Georgina Moulton (University of Manchester)
• Katy Wolstencroft (The University of Manchester)

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Advanced Features of Taverna - A Practical Room: IT 407

Advanced Features of Taverna - A Practical Continued Room: IT 407

Building Web Services - A Practical Room: IT 407

A Taste of the Future - Taverna2

• Stian Soiland (The University of Manchester, myGrid Team)

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Introduction to day 3 Room: IT 407 This day explores concepts of grid computing, introduces the UK's National Grid Service and gives experience of some of the alternative ways to run compute jobs on the NGS: <ul> <li> The Resource Broker is a grid service that abstracts the compute resources of the NGS: users do not need to identify a specific compute node to run their job; users simply submit a job to the NGS's Resource Broker. A user creates a simple text file that describes a job and its requirements. Using a command-line interface, client software is used to send this file to the resource broker; this then matches the job's requirements to the available compute resources and submits the job to a compute node on the user's behalf. <li> The NGS Applications Repository. This uses an alternative way to describe a job, and holds a library of such descriptions so frequently run jobs can easily be submitted to an NGS resource. This uses a portal interface, accessible from a browser, so no client software is needed by the user. <li>The P-Grade portal brings together the power of grid computing and the elegance of workflow </ul>

An Introduction to Grid Computing and the National Grid Service Room: IT 407

Gaining access to the NGS Room: IT 407 This talk describes the procedure to be followed to gain access as a user; note it is free to UK academic researchers. It also introduces the UK Certificate Authority and the X.509 certificate, required to use the NGS.

The Resource Broker Room: IT 407

The NGS Applications Repository Room: IT 407 Introduction to the repository (also known as the "NGS Portal").

The NGS Applications Repository - practical Room: IT 407

The P-Grade Portal

• Tamas Kiss (University of Westminster)

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P-Grade continued

• Tamas Kiss (University of Westminster)

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Case Study - GENIUS Room: IT 407 Grid Enabled Neurosurgical Imaging Using Simulation - a presentation provided by Stefan Zasada of UCL.

End of day discussion Room: IT 407

Introduction to day 4 Room: IT 407 Today the focus is on data and storage services on the NGS: <ul> <li> The Storage Resource Broker: provides a POSIX-like interface to a virtual filesystem, so files can be stored in the SRB and accessed from any NGS node. THis is the recommended way for users and collaborations to hold their files. <li> GridFTP permits files to be efficiently transferred between nodes of the NGS <li> Oracle. The NGS has deployed an Oracle service, and this is available to host researchers' relational data. <li> OGSA-DAI: this toolkit primarily provides a way for data that are not held on grid-specific resources (like the SRB or Oracle NGS service) to be exposed in a controlled way for use in applications that run on a grid. (OGSA= "Open Grid Services Architecture", an architecture for using web services to build grids; DAI="Data Access and Integration"). An OGSA-DAI service is deployed by the owner of the data resource, with installed "activities" which a user can invoke, via a Java client. These activities execute as steps in workflow: they execute close to where data resources are held. These data may be relational, XML or flat-files. OGSA-DAI is an extendable toolkit: new data resource types and new activities can be deployed by the publisher of the data. OGSA-DAI is developed as part of the <A HREF="http://www.omii.ac.uk">OMII-UK</A> initiative. </ul>

Data and Storage Services on the NGS Room: IT 407

Storage Resource Broker Room: IT 407

GridFTP Room: IT 407

The NGS Oracle Service

• Simon Collins (University of Manchester)
• Keir Hawker (Rutherford Laboratories)

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continued Room: IT 407

Grid Data Services using OGSA-DAI Room: IT 407

OGSA-DAI continued Room: IT 407

End of day discussion Room: IT 407

Introduction to day 5 Room: IT 407 <p> The morning session continues to focus on the NGS. Horizons are then broadened from the UK emphasis of the last two days to look at the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) infrastructure for international e-research. This uses the gLite middleware. </p> <p> After lunch horizons are broadened yet further, to survey the "grid islands" that exist - with different grids based on different middleware, isolating resources and researchers on their chosen island. With reference to the <a href="http://wisdom.eu-egee.fr"> WISDOM</a> project, which is using grid computing to address drug discovery for neglected and emergent diseases, the need for interoperability across grids will be explored.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.omii-europe.org"> OMII-Europe</a> is creating standards-based components to permit a collaboration to access resources across different grids. </p> <p> The final talk summarises the options open to participants, should they wish to: <ul> <li> deploy Taverna <li> join the NGS as a user or as a new project <li> gain experience of the EGEE grid and its gLite middleware <li> evaluate the OMII-Europe components </ul>

Computational steering on the NGS Room: IT 407

Virtual Organisations and the NGS Room: IT 407 The NGS recently deployed VOMS, the Virtual Organisation Membership System. This talk explains Virtual organisations, VOMS and its implications for NGS users.

EGEE: an infrastructure for international e-science Room: IT 407 <p> <a href="http://www.eu-egee.org/">EGEE</a> is an EU initiative to build international grid infrastructure. This talk describes the status of the EGEE infrastructure, gives an overview of EGEE's <a href="http://www.glite.org">gLite</a> middleware, and outlines the bio/health applications that are benefitting from EGEE. </p>

OMII-Europe: Bridging grids Room: IT 407

Next steps Room: IT 407

Closing discussion Room: IT 407