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First OMII-UK Collaborations Workshop is a fantastic success!

The first OMII-UK Collaborations Workshop brought together 38 attendees from 25 different groups. Everyone agreed that it had been a fantastic success, because many new collaborations could result from the workshop.

The workshop saw OMII-UK staff, software developers, architects and users meeting up to produce collaborative solutions to problems of interest to the e-Research community. Participants were encouraged to register well-focused topics for discussion. Inviting people from outside OMII-UK to the workshop provided extremely valuable input.

The outcomes of the meeting are available on the Collaborations Workshop wiki page. Another event is planned for the future. Keep an eye on the OMII-UK website for details.

www.tinyurl.com/d8sr5r

Grid integration for Taverna

Taverna has taken the first steps toward seamless grid integration. Thanks to experts at the University of Lubeck, Taverna can now connect with KnowARC's Advance Resource Connector (ARC) middleware.

Users simply enter a URL from within the Taverna interface, and the system will download an ARC client in the background, and use it like any local computing resource. ARC can be deployed on many different platforms, and can interact with numerous local resource managers.

www.knowarc.eu

GridSAM’s disaster scenario

Researchers from the University of Muenster and the STFC recently used an instance of GridSAM available on the National Grid Service, to develop and run a grid-based version of an atmospheric model for forecasting trace particle trajectories. The results were used in a demonstration of an airport disaster response scenario, as part of the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC)Interoperability Program.

The OGC leads development of standards for geospatial and location-based services.

www.opengeospatial.org

BioCatalogue is launched

The main portal for the BioCatalogue project will be launched during ISMB/ECCB 2009, which will be held in Stockholm on 28 June 2009 to 2 July 2009.

The BioCatalogue project will provide a single registration point for Web Service providers and a single search site for scientists and developers. BioCatalogue will also act as a place where the community can find contacts and meet the experts and maintainers of these services.

A BioCatalogue demo will take place at ISMB/ECCB on 1 July 2009 at 14.45.

www.biocatalogue.org

Grid Summer School 2009

The International summer school on Grid Computing 2009 (ISSGC 09) takes place on 5-17 July 2009 at Sophia Antipolis: a technology centre near Nice, in the South of France. OMII-UK will provides tutorial sessions on OMII-UK’s SAGA, OGSA-DAI and GridSAM software.

Principles of job submission in GridSAM will be covered in GridSAM tutorial. The SAGA tutorial will cover how it's simple API may be used to access grid resources, and will use the resources developed in the GridSAM tutorial. The OGSA-DAI tutorial will provide an overview and implement simple workflows that operate on an OGSA-DAI server.

www.tinyurl.com/oc7w6j

OMII-UK aids new OGF Standard

The Parameter Sweep Extension to the OGF JSDL specification has just been published as a full OGF recommendation. With help from OMII-UK, STFC’s David Meredith and Oxford University’s Geoff Williams were put in touch with the JSDL Working Group and were able to help progress the specification to full recommendation status.

This important standard enables a multitude of compute jobs to be parametrically specified within a single JSDL description, as opposed to laboriously specifying each job individually.

www.tinyurl.com/r2qus3