Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

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New Issue of the OMII-UK Newsletter

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

The new issue of the OMII-UK newsletter is out which talks about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) getting back on its feet, and causing a lot of excitement in the scientific community. This issue of the OMII-UK Newsletter, has Jamie Shiers from CERN’s talking about the LHC Grid: “the most demanding and convincing demonstration of grid computing”.

You can download the newsletter in the following formats:

On the front page of the Newsletter, Neil Chue Hong, Director of OMII-UK, shares his vision for the future of software sustainability, and inside an overview of Neil’s presentation on sustainability, a video of which is now available on-line, is presented. We also hear about NASA’s use of Taverna and the successes of two of the Engage projects: one that is investigating drug characteristics and one that has developed software that understands chemistry.

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New free eBook: The Fourth Paradigm

Friday, October 16th, 2009

The UK e-Science programme always recognised the importance of data. The Fourth Paradigm recognises that data-intensive science is dramatically changing the way research is performed, and is an excellent compendium of progress with this new approach. It is also dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray, who christened data-intensive research “The New Paradigm”, who shaped the transactional model of databases we all depend on, who led Microsoft into supporting the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and into developing new database technology to support data-intensive research. Sadly, Jim was mysteriously lost at sea in January 2007.

The book has several connections with UK e-Science since the prime mover and first editor is Tony Hey. OMII-UK PIs, Carole Goble and Dave De Roure, have both written chapters in the book and are attending the book launch at the Microsoft e-Science conference in Pittsburgh today.

The book will be available for free download from the website (at 9.00am East Coast time and 2.00pm UK time):

In addition, the New York times also had a highly relevant article this week:

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Software Sustainability: Looking Past the Myths

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Neil Chue Hong, the Director of OMII-UK, will be presenting a public lecture ‘Software Sustainability: Looking Past the Myths’, at the e-Science Institute, Edinburgh on 29 October 2009 at 4.00pm UK time (GMT+1).

Further information can be found on the lecture web page .

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OGSA-DAI 3.2 released

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

The OGSA-DAI project, a partner in OMII-UK, have released version 3.2 of their database access and integration software.

OGSA-DAI is an extensible framework for the access and management of distributed heterogeneous data resources – whether these be databases, files or other types of data – via web services. OGSA-DAI provides a workflow engine for the execution of workflows implementing data access, update, transformation, federation and delivery scenarios.

 The main features of OGSA-DAI 3.2 are as follows:

OGSA-DAI 3.2 now includes Distributed Query Processing (DQP).

  • DQP allows the tables from multiple distributed relational databases to be queried, using SQL, as if there were multiple tables in a single database. These databases are exposed via OGSA-DAI servers.
  • DQP was originally designed and developed by at the University of Manchester and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Previous versions of DQP were released as a separate product – OGSA-DQP.
  • DQP has now been rewritten and is now simply an extension to OGSA-DAI. DQP’s functionality is now exposed as OGSA-DAI resources and activities and accessed via OGSA-DAI’s standard services. This greatly simplifies deployment and enables extensibility within a single framework.

Non-blocking data sinks that allow data pushed to OGSA-DAI from a client to be cached until it’s ready to be processed.

A new monitoring framework which tracks the data blocks produced and consumed by each activity in a workflow.

Support for relational database-specific meta-data extractors and mappers from JDBC column types to OGSA-DAI tuple types.

New security activities for passing client credentials through workflows and retrieving credentials from a Globus Delegation Service.

More efficient GridFTP activities.

A number of bugs have been fixed, components made more efficient or robust.

Unlike previous versions of OGSA-DAI, OGSA-DAI 3.2 only compiles under Java 1.5 and not Java 1.4. Apart from this, OGSA-DAI 3.2 is designed to be backwards compatible with OGSA-DAI 3.1 without the need for recompilation – data resource, activity and presentation layer APIs and service WSDLs remain the same.

OGSA-DAI is a free, open source, 100% Java product and is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Downloads compatible with Apache Axis 1.4, Globus 4.0.8 and Globus 4.2.0, are available

To download OGSA-DAI 3.2 visit: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai/files/

OGSA-DAI 3.2’s user doc is at

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ogsa-dai/wiki/UserDocumentation/ogsadai3.2

and the release notes at:

http://ogsa-dai.sourceforge.net/documentation/ogsadai3.2/ogsadai3.2-axis/Release.html

http://ogsa-dai.sourceforge.net/documentation/ogsadai3.2/ogsadai3.2-gt/Release.html

To find out more about OGSA-DAI visit our project WWW site at

http://www.ogsadai.org.uk

and our open source project site at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai

The OGSA-DAI project – which involves both EPCC and NeSC – is funded by EPSRC through OMII-UK. For further information about OMII-UK visit

http://www.omii.ac.uk.

Cheers, mike

On behalf of the OGSA-DAI team.

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OGSA-DAI source code on SourceForge

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

OMII-UK’s OGSA-DAI project is currently in the process of transforming itself from being an open source product to an open source project, encouraging an open development model so that the OGSA-DAI community can become more involved in future development of OGSA-DAI. As part of this process we are migrating our source code to reside in an open source project site hosted by SourceForge.

The initial upload of our new Subversion repository can now be browsed online at:

http://ogsa-dai.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ogsa-dai/

or can be anonymously checked out using an SVN client:

http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=261620

Please see our SourceForge SVN pages for full information on how to check out the code using an SVN client, the repository structure, how to build it and how to run unit and system tests within your own environment:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ogsa-dai/wiki/OGSADAISubversion

If you would like to get involved please see our governanace model at:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ogsa-dai/wiki/GovernanceModel

There is also an e-mail list – ogsa-dai-svn-commits@lists.sourceforge.net - that you can subscribe to if you want to be notified of source code commits, see:

http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=261620

Over the next month we will be migrating additional code into this repository to bring it into alignment with our OGSA-DAI 3.2 release. This includes adding DQP which is now an integral part of the OGSA-DAI product.

Cheers,

mike

On behalf of the OGSA-DAI project team.

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OMII-UK CSP Funding

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Call for Proposals in Data and Information Management

OMII-UK identifies gaps in the provision of e-Research software and commissions developers to produce software accordingly through its Commissioned Software Programme (CSP).

At this time, OMII-UK invites organisations to submit funding proposals for software development projects which address the changing needs of the research community in its ability to deal with data and information.

Some of the drivers for this include: increased access to machine-readable public data sets; use of in-silico experimentation; emergence of storage clouds; lack of integration between different data storage mechanisms and data analysis frameworks and tools; and additional requirements for data curation, integrity and provenance.

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UK AHM: Abstact Deadline Extended

Friday, June 26th, 2009

The deadline for submission of abstracts to the UK e-Science AHM2009 in Oxford has been extended to 10 July 2009. Authors can expect to be informed of the outcome by 26 August 2009. For further information and to submit an abstract please go to:

http://www.allhands.org.uk/call-abstracts.

For any other enquiries please email: admin@allhands.org.uk.

More information about this meeting is available from the web site at: http://www.allhands.org.uk.

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OGSA-DAI advisory: MySQL and Zero Date/Time

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

We’ve issued an advisory about the use of the MySQL and OGSA-DAI if you are planning to or are having problems in getting Date/Time fields from an MySQL database which are zeroed. Full details are available at:

http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/ogsa-dai/wiki/SoftwareAdvisoryOD3

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OMII-UK Newsletter Out

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

The June issue of the OMII-UK Newsletter is available from:

Plenty more fish in the sea? Possibly not. In this month’s issue of the OMII-UK Newsletter, we hear from EGEE’s Danielle Venton. EGEE have been working with many collaborators to develop a new grid-based tool called AquaMaps, which is providing insight into the size and location of fish stocks.

The newsletter shows that it’s been an exciting few months for OMII-UK: we held a very successful Collaborations Workshop, OGSA-DAI is moving into open development and we are mentoring students in this year’s Google Summer of Code. We also hear about Engage’s work with Richard Edwards, a biologist who looks at the ways in which viruses operate. Engage has helped Richard to make his software available to a wide community of researchers. We also take a look at the sharing of genomic data, the Chinese railway grid and the use of Taverna in the cancer grid.

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UK AHM2009: Past, Present and Future

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Call for submission of Abstracts for UK AHM
Closing Date: 30 June 2009
Decisions to Authors: 19 August 2009

This year, the UK’s All Hands Meeting will take place in Oxford, UK from 7 – 9 December 2009

Authors are invited to submit abstracts of unpublished, original work of not more than 3 pages of text using single spaced 10 point size on A4 pages – including 2 pages of text and (optionally) 1 of figures and tables. Authors should submit abstracts satisfying the formatting guidelines as a PDF file using the AHM2009 paper submission system which will be available shortly.

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