Focus on:  Hide Contributions
Login

SCARF / National Grid Service Users Tutorial

→ Europe/Zurich
room CR08, RAL

room CR08, RAL
Duncan Tooke, Mike Mineter
Description

Grid computing empowers collaborations across different institutions by enabling them to share resources of data and computation. Current developments using grid computing are across a wide spectrum of research ('e-Research'), engineering, public service, provision of digital libraries.

The National Grid Service (NGS) is the core UK grid service resulting from the UK's e-Science program. It is intended for the production use of computational and data grid resources for scientific and academic research purposes. Use of the NGS is available to members of the UK academic and scientific communities. Projects involving large data volumes, high computation requirements or geographically widespread collaborators may benefit from using the NGS.

The goals of this course are to give participants:

  • An understanding of the concepts of Grid Computing and e-Research.
  • An orientation to the use of SCARF
  • An orientation to the NGS and the Grid Operations Support Centre (http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/).
  • Sufficient practical experience to allow initial use of the National Grid Service and SCARF in future.

The course is presented jointly by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the training team of the National e-Science Centre. Registration is by email to Duncan Tooke, D.M.Tooke@rl.ac.uk. Laptops will be required for the practicals.
  • Monday, 24 April
    • 09:15 → 17:00
      Day 1: Grid Concepts and using the National Grid Service
      • 09:15
        Welcome and Overview of the Tutorial 15m
      • 09:30
        What is Grid Computing? 50m
        Speaker: Mike Mineter
        transparencies
      • 10:20
        Introduction to SCARF 10m
      • 10:30
        The National Grid Service 25m
        The NGS is described including its organisation, middleware, and procedures for gaining an account.
        Speaker: Guy Warner
        transparencies
      • 10:55
        e-Visualisation: The Power of the Grid 15m
        To demonstrate the true power of the Grid, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's e-Visualisation group will demonstrate software currently running in a production environment.
        Speaker: Lakshmi Sastry
      • 11:10
        Tea / Coffee 15m
      • 11:25
        Gaining Access to the NGS 1h
        An overview of security, authentication and authorisation on the NGS. Practical: using certificates on the National Grid Service.
        Speaker: Mike Mineter
        more information
        transparencies
      • 12:25
        Creating and Running an Application on the NGS 30m
        Speaker: Guy Warner
        misc
        more information
      • 13:00
        Lunch 1h
      • 14:00
        Creating and Running an Application on the NGS continued 1h 10m
      • 15:10
        Graphical Access to the NGS for All 25m
        Speaker: David Spence (RAL)
        transparencies
      • 15:35
        Tea / Coffee 15m
      • 15:50
        Making life easier for users: MyProxy and Portals 30m
        An introduction to the MyProxy service followed by a short practical. The P-GRADE portal is also described. Developed by SZTAKI, Hungary and adapted for use on the NGS by the University of Westminster, this is an option for deploying legacy applications on grids.
        more information
        transparencies
      • 16:20
        Storage Resource Broker on the NGS 40m
        A brief introduction to the SRB. Developed by San Diego Supercomputing Center, the SRB permits data files held in different NGS sites to be perceived as one virtual filesystem.
        more information
        transparencies
  • Tuesday, 25 April
    • 09:15 → 16:00
      Day 2 morning: Programming on the National Grid Service
      • 09:15
        Overview of Day 2 15m
      • 09:30
        NGS Computation Services: API's and Parallel Jobs 1h 30m
        A brief talk followed by a practical to illustrate some of the options for creating applications to run on the NGS.
        Speaker: Mike Mineter
        more information
        transparencies
      • 11:00
        Coffee 20m
      • 11:15
        Data services on the National Grid Service 10m
        An overview is given of the data services on the NGS: SRB, OGSA-DAI, GridFTP.
        transparencies
      • 11:25
        The ORACLE Service 10m
        Speaker: Gordon Brown
        transparencies
      • 11:35
        OGSA-DAI: data access and integration 1h 10m
        Speaker: Guy Warner
        misc
        more information
        transparencies
      • 12:45
        GridFTP 20m
        Speaker: Guy Warner
        transparencies
      • 13:05
        Lunch 1h
    • 14:00 → 17:00
      Day 2: Afternoon - A look to the future
      • 14:00
        An introduction to Web Services, Grids and WS-RF 1h
        Speaker: Mike Mineter
        transparencies
      • 15:00
        Next steps 15m
        How to obtain a UK e-science certificate and how to gain access to the NGS.
        Speaker: Guy Warner
        transparencies
      • 15:15
        Tea / Coffee 20m room CR08, RAL

        room CR08, RAL
      • 15:30
        NGS and emerging middleware 45m
        The "e-Infrastructure ecosystem" of the UK is described, with reference to the international EGEE grid, GridPP, OMII-UK and JISC initiatives. The options for future deployment by the NGS are outlined.
        Speaker: Mike Mineter
        transparencies
      • 16:15
        Discussion 20m
  • Wednesday, 26 April
    • 09:00 → 16:00
      Day 3: using SCARF
      • 10:00
        Tea / Coffee 20m
      • 10:20
        Introduction and overview 10m
        Speaker: Peter Oliver
      • 10:30
        SCARF - the last 6 months 40m
        Speaker: Duncan Tooke
      • 11:10
        Grid switchover - reasons, practicalities and the future 40m
        Speaker: Duncan Tooke
      • 11:50
        Discussion session 10m
      • 12:00
        Buffet lunch 1h
      • 13:00
        Getting the most from SCARF 45m
        Speaker: Duncan Tooke
      • 13:45
        Upcoming developments and the SCARF roadmap 45m
        Speaker: Duncan Tooke
      • 14:30
        Discussion session with coffee 30m
Powered by Indico v3.3.3-pre