Steve Crouch, OMII-UK Southampton Stephen McGough , Imperial College London

1. OMII-UK: progressing from adopting open specifications to sustainable open development by fostering Asia-Pacific collaborations and creating communities Steve Crouch, OMII-UK Southampton Stephen McGough, Imperial College London ShantenuJha, Louisiana State University17/09/08

2. Introduction to the Session • OMII-UK: who we are and how we can help • Reducing the gap between e-Researchers and e-Infrastructure • Creating communities – users and developers • OGF standards - where/how are they used? • Highlight Asia Pacific collaborations

3. OMII-UK: Supporting e-Research OMII-UK provides software and services to help the UK research community adopt e-Research practices and technology http://www.omii.ac.uk • Teams from Southampton, Manchesterand Edinburgh universities • Funding from EPSRC from 2004 to 2010 • Software, e.g. • Workflow design and execution – Taverna • Access/integrate data – OGSA-DAI - tutorial session today at 4pm, here! • Manage and access computational resources – GridSAM; Campus Grid Toolkit, OMII-SAGA • Build active, sustainable communities around developed open source products that use appropriate accepted/emerging open standards

4. OMII-UK: Adding benefit to e-Science • More than just the middleware • go above the components to provide added value • Skilled team to help the community • putting the right things together, integrating components • providing consultancy and support to improve uptake • developing, commissioning and improving software

5. From Open Standards to Sustainable Open Development Open Standards Open Standards Open Standards Internal Development Open Development Sustainable Open Development Complete the open cycle Active open engagement from developer community Active open engagement from user communities Sustainable, user-driven development Host development on community development infrastructure Active open engagement from developer community Satisfy further requirements to increase uptake Internal development Satisfy initial requirements Developer community involvement User community involvement

6. Bridging the Gaps e-Researchers ENGAGE Developers SOFTWARE CSPs Support,Expertise

7. Commissioned Software Programme • Funded projects to address identified gaps in e-Research software and e-Infrastructure • Further development of existing prototypes and improvement of existing software • To increase user uptake, where interest exists • Open source, accessible to community developers • Proposals evaluated reactively, or in response to a call for software • Software evaluated at intervals throughout project

8. CSP Projects and OGF Standards • Funding/funded variety of projects that use OGF standards: • Application Hosting Environment (AHE) – JSDL • OGRSH (GenesisII) – ByteIO, RNS, BES, JSDL, HPC-Profile • RAPID – JSDL • JSDL Application Repository – JSDL • OMII-SAGA – SAGA, JSDL • GridSAM, ICTGridSAM – BES, JSDL, HPC-Profile, DRMAA • OMII-AuthZ – AuthZ • Grimoires – GLUE

9. OMII-Europe Component Exchange • OMII-Europe: re-engineering of Grid middleware components to support interoperability through appropriate open standards • Middleware components sourced across six areas • Virtual Organisation Management: OGSA-AuthZ, SAML • Accounting: OGSA-RUS and OGSA-UR • Data Access: WS-DAI* • Job Submission, Component Exchange: OGSA-BES, JSDL, HPC-Profile • Portals: much of the above • Globus, gLite and UNICORE - primary infrastructures • Facilitated a two-way exchange of components between OMII-Europe and our project partners in China • Beihang University: Meta Scheduler within CROWN • Coordinated implementation of BES interface to the Scheduler

10. The CROWN BES Meta Scheduler BES job submission and query Container OMII container BES job submission and query BES endpoint BES Client CROWN Meta-Scheduler Resource availability e.g. GridSAM, UNICORE-BES, CREAM-BES … Internal Registry

11. Engaging Research with e-Infrastructure • Interviewing researchers to identify what works and what’s needed • Analysing requirements and proposing interventions • Developing solutions and disseminating best practice www.engage.ac.uk

12. The ENGAGE philosophy • What do people do? • What do people want to do? • not how can they use what we’ve got to do it • Trivial barriers are sometimes insurmountable • what’s easy for us is often frustrating for others • don’t assume the last step’s easy for everyone • let’s celebrate success in the community • Try to extend beyond the “usual suspects” • Solve specific technical issues for specific users

13. ENGAGE Interviews by domain

14. ENGAGE preliminary, non-empirical qualitative finding People will tend to prioritise ease of use, support and continued development over a complete feature set This requires a sustainable community around the software and trust by the users in the e-Infrastructure providers (and vice-versa) Don’t agree? Sign up for an interview to correct the bias! info@engage.ac.uk

15. High Throughput Humanities for e-Research • Improve the accessibility and usability of digitised texts • 19th Century Serials Edition • Calculate similarity measures to allow comparisons to be made • computationally intensive • Gerhard Brey

16. Exposing Bioinformatic Programs as Web Services • Develop better approaches for detecting Protein – Protein Interaction Motifs in protein datasets • Improve repeatability, collaboration and increase available resources • Richard Edwards

17. Docking and Molecular Dynamics Simulations • Aid the understanding of the nature of glycans • devise vaccines which reduce undesired events • Improve the use and efficiency of molecular dynamics simulation packages on NGS • Babak Afrough, Hans Heidl

18. Addressing the Issues of Uptake • Number of issues identified by user community and Campus Grid SIG • Issues need to be resolved e.g. for University College London: • Already using GridSAM in Theoretical Chemistry group & Centre for Computational Science • Number of research domains with own applications, in neurological modelling, Markov models/genetics, chemistry, nanoscale electronics, gene search • Legion cluster: PBS/Torque, Lustre shared filesystem • With Applications Hosting Environment (AHE), use GridSAM to access resources • Challenges in supporting platforms, accounting, security, job management • How do we organise resources and manage an approach to this?