OMII-UK: progressing from adopting open specifications to sustainable open development by fostering Asia-Pacific collaborations and creating communities

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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
• Shantenu Jha, Louisiana State University17/09/08

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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

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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

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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

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From Open Standards to Sustainable Open
Development
Open Standards
Internal Development
Internal development Satisfy initial requirements
Developer community involvement
User community involvement
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Bridging the Gaps
e-Researchers
Developers
SOFTWARE
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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

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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

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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

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The CROWN BES Meta Scheduler
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Engaging Research with e-Infrastructure

• Interviewing researchers to identify what works
  and whats needed
• Analysing requirements and proposing
  interventions
• Developing solutions and disseminating best
  practice
• www.engage.ac.uk

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The ENGAGE philosophy

• What do people do?
• What do people want to do?
• not how can they use what weve got to do it
• Trivial barriers are sometimes insurmountable
• whats easy for us is often frustrating for
  others
• dont assume the last steps easy for everyone
• lets celebrate success in the community
• Try to extend beyond the usual suspects
• Solve specific technical issues for specific
  users

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Methodology

• Identification of interviewees through lists,
  workshops and word of mouth
• Semi-structured initial interviews (in person or
  by telephone)
• Analysis and assessment of interview
• Follow-up interviews to establish detail
• Investment of effort to fix specific problems
• Dissemination of successes

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ENGAGE Interviews by domain
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What happens after initial interview
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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)

Dont agree? Sign up for an interview to correct
the bias! info_at_engage.ac.uk
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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

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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

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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

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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?