National Institute

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National Institute For Environmental
eScience (NIEeS) Stuart Ballard
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Outline

• House keeping
• What is a grid and what is eScience?
• The NIEeS

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What is a grid?

• It is analogous to an electricity grid
• You dont care where your electricity is coming
  from.
• Same with a grid, you just plug in your appliance
  and expect service on demand

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But what constitutes a grid?

• Sharing disparate, loosely coupled IT resources
  across organizations and geographies
• Resources can be computer cycles, storage
  capacity, databases, applications, files, sensors
  or scientific instruments
• Resources dynamically provisioned to the user or
  applications that need them
• Resources held together in a software environment
  (middleware) based upon open standards and
  protocols

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The current situation for a scientist
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Scientist becomes an eScientist
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eScience toolbox

• Middleware tools to enable computing in a grid
  environment, e.g. Globus toolkit and Condor
• Portal technologies access to compute and data
  resources via the web
• Web services initiating processes via the web
• XML (eXtensible Markup Language) language to
  document data (metadata) and processes
• Security based on X.509 certificates

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NIEeS
Partnership between
With objective to support development of eScience
programmes within the environmental science
community
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Some examples of where eScience is being used
. . .
Earth system modelling
Pollution
Earth observation
Modelling natural hazards
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Environmental eScience range
From global ...
to molecular
and from millennia to nanoseconds
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NIEeS Our role
The National Institute for Environmental eScience
was established to play a role in supporting the
development of the UK environmental eScience
programme NIEeS focuses on helping the
environmental scientist learn and potentially
implement eScience tools
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How we achieve our role

• We achieve our role through initiating and
  supporting activities such as
• workshops
• Training courses
• working group programmes
• Helping environmental scientists with eScience
  related queries
• supporting visitors
• demonstration projects

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Talks, training, practicals discussions
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Just some of the topics covered so far
Discrete element modelling, visualisation,
metadata, remote sensing, nuclear waste, data
formats, toxic elements, XML, desktop grids,
invasive species, Access Grid, Earth System
modelling, GIS, collaborative tools,
griddatabase integration
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Some recent training events

• Web services
• SRB
• Condor
• OGSA-DAI
• CDAT
• XML marine and chemical languages

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International links
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And finally the NIEeS and you!

• We support
• Ideas for workshops, training events, showcase
  events etc
• Proposals for working groups and visitors
• Collaborations leading to demonstrator and pilot
  projects
• Longer-term collaborations
• But we are not a grant-giving agency!