National Centre for e-Social Science: Winter Training School

27 Feb 2006, 09:00 → 2 Mar 2006, 21:00 Europe/Zurich

Kilburn Building--Lascelles Williams (University of Manchester)

National Centre for e-Social Science

Draft agenda for NCESS Winter School

Monday 27 February

09:00 → 09:30 Registration & Coffee

09:30 → 21:00 The Grid & the NGS

This first day sessions are run by the National e-Science Centre which provide an introduction to Grid computing, The NGS and the computation services based on their course material from the "Induction to Grid Computing and the NGS" events.

09:30 Welcome

Speaker: Peter Halfpenny (National Centre for e-Social Science)

09:40 What is Grid Computing?

Speaker: Richard Hopkins (NeSC)

10:25 The National Grid Service

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

11:00 Tea & Coffee

11:15 Gaining Access

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

11:45 Practical: Installing Certificates

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

12:15 Creating and running an application on the NGS

Speaker: Richard Hopkins (NeSC)

12:30 Practical: Job Submission

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

13:00 Lunch

14:00 Practical continued

15:00 NGS Computation Services: API's and Parallel Jobs

Speaker: Richard Hopkins (NeSC)

15:15 Practical: Job Submission Part 2

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

15:45 Tea & Coffee

16:00 Practical continued

16:40 Next Steps

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

17:05 NGS in the Future

Speaker: Richard Hopkins (NeSC)

17:30 Case Study: GEMEDA

Speaker: Simon Peters (University of Manchester)

18:00 Close

19:00 Dinner

Tuesday 28 February

10:00 → 14:00 SRB and Web Services

This session provides an introduction to Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and Web Services. SRB is a uniform interface to a virtual distributed data storage resource where users can access files and database objects. Web Services is a framework for interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network, by software systems (services) using web-based standards and machine-processable interface definitions.

10:00 Data Services on the NGS

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

10:20 Introduction to SRB

Speaker: Richard Hopkins (NeSC)

10:40 Practical: SRB

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

11:00 Tea & Coffee

11:15 Concepts of Web Services

Speaker: Richard Hopkins (NeSC)

12:00 Practical: Quote of the Day

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

13:00 Lunch

14:00 → 21:00 Condor

This session provides an introduction to Condor; workload management for High Throughput Computing (HTC) on large collections of distributively owned computing resources e.g. job queueing, scheduling, prioritisation, resource monitoring, and resource management.

14:00 An introduction to Condor

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

14:30 Practical: Basic job submission

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

15:20 Tea & Coffee

15:40 Workflows within Condor

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

16:20 Practical: Condor DAG's

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

18:00 Close

19:00 Dinner

Wednesday 1 March

10:00 → 14:00 OGSA-DAI

This session provides an introduction to data services on the NGS and the Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI); API inteface to grid-enabled XML and relational databases via web services.

10:00 Introduction to OGSA-DAI

Speaker: Richard Hopkins (NeSC)

10:40 Practical: Data Joins using OGSA-DAI

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

11:20 Tea & Coffee

11:40 Advanced features of OGSA-DAI

Speaker: Richard Hopkins (NeSC)

12:10 Practical: Writing OGSA-DAI activities

Speaker: Guy Warner (NeSC)

more information more information

13:00 Lunch

14:00 → 21:00 OGSA-DQP

This session provides an introduction to the Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access Distributed Query Processing (DQP); supports queries over OGSA-DAI data services and over other services available on the Grid.

14:00 Case study

14:30 OGSA-DQP: Technical Overview

15:00 OGSA-DQP: Backend & Client

15:15 Tea & Coffee

15:30 demo

• setting-up demo
• using-it demo

15:45 interaction: potential cases from participants

17:30 Case Study: ConvertGRID

Speaker: Keith Cole (University of Manchester)

18:00 Close

19:00 Dinner

Thursday 2 March

10:00 → 14:00 Portals

This session provides an introduction to Portals; a gateway to distributed applications and resources that run on on different types of middleware and hardware.

10:00 Portals Tutorial

Speaker: Rob Allan (Daresbury Laboratory)

11:00 Demo 1: NGS portal

11:15 Tea & Coffee

11:30 Sakai

12:00 Demo 2: Collaboration in Sakai

12:15 Making it all work together

12:30 Demo 3: Sakai + uPortal

13:00 Lunch

14:00 → 17:00 OMII Software Stack

This session provides an introduction to OMII; a web service infrastructure for building grid applications.

14:00 OMII-UK Introduction

Speaker: Steven Newhouse (OMII)

14:15 OMII Client Distribution

15:20 Tea &Coffee

15:40 Case Study

17:00 → 18:05 Future Directions in Grid Middleware

17:00 Grid Futures - Where Are We Going Next? A Pragmatic Viewpoint

Speaker: Jennifer M. Schopf (Argonne National Laboratory)

18:00 Close

Speaker: Peter Halfpenny (National Centre for e-Social Science)

18:15 → 21:00 NCeSS Node Jamboree