News

EduServ 2011

posted Apr 1, 2011 3:29 PM by news reporter

Terry Harmer to present at the EduServ Symposium 2011 on BeSC's practical experience of deploying and managing clouds.
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/newsandevents/events/eduserv-symposium-2011#Agenda

Cloud central to Government ICT Strategy

posted Mar 31, 2011 7:37 AM by Terence Harmer [ updated Mar 31, 2011 7:41 AM ]

Cloud technology is central to the Government's ICT strategy outlined today by the Cabinet Office.

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/government-ict-strategy

EPSRC and JISC Fund Echo Cloud Project at Belfast e-Science

posted Mar 29, 2011 11:49 AM by Terence Harmer

PI: Dr Alan Stewart.
co-PIs: Dr Terence Harmer and Professor Ron Perrott

The ECHO project assumes a resource landscape where utility clouds are the norm and aims to experiment with the added value capabilities which the utility resource landscape might offer.

The work will not focus on one cloud provider or one provider’s technology but experiment with applications that are multi-provider and provider technology agnostic. The goal is to use the emerging cloud providers as a marketplace for delivering the best value to researchers at the time they require resources. The work shall look at both small and large scale applications, and investigate how dynamic resource scaling, resilience and quality of service can be achieved and how these might benefit the research community.

More details: http://www.besc.ac.uk/ECHO

BeSC's ECHO Cloud Pilot highlighted in JISC Cloud funding Annoucement

posted Mar 29, 2011 11:46 AM by Terence Harmer [ updated Mar 29, 2011 11:49 AM ]

News release
29 March 2011

Invest to save, says Dr Malcolm Read

JISC executive secretary Dr Malcolm Read has called for more investment in cloud computing in front of an international audience today.

Speaking to policy makers, funders, vendors and researchers at a Belgium workshop run by e-Infranet, which develops policies to promote world-class ICT infrastructures, Dr Read said: “In an uncertain funding climate it’s essential that we prioritise. Cloud computing can give universities access to economies of scale which offers real financial benefits – as well as the potential to improve your carbon footprint and deal more flexibly with the changing needs of students and staff in the fast-moving university environment.”

He added: “Our studies show that many universities and colleges in the UK are interested in harnessing cloud computing power – but fewer are actually using it.”

JISC’s studies last year revealed that few universities have formal polices on the adoption or use of cloud computing - even though it is widely accepted that a centrally managed approach to contracting cloud computing services is required for real efficiency benefits.

Dr Read said: “Researchers and higher education staff need to be able to trust the reliability and integrity of the cloud they use so we need to invest in better services and ensure that they meet the very specific needs of our academic communities.”

JISC is currently funding 11 pilot cloud projects together with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to look into the usefulness of the cloud for research in more detail and find out what the benefits and issues are <http://cloudresearch.jiscinvolve.org>

JISC is also funding projects that are transitioning service solutions into the cloud in research management, core and corporate information management and student services. These projects will be reporting in July 2011.

In addition JISC is managing HEFCE’s university modernisation fund to establish a shared brokerage service for a central UK higher education cloud.

Zeel/i Managed Cloud Users Gain Access to 1 Teraflops GPGPU Resources

posted Nov 16, 2010 4:22 AM by Peter Wright

Users of the Zeel/i managed cloud abstraction now have full access to model and provision Amazon's new GPGPU HPC resources.

These resources contain 2 nVidia "Fermi" M2050 GPUs, each capable of 512 Gigaflops and a full-bisection 10 Gigabit network backbone. A full description is available on the AWS Blog.

NGS Innovation Forum '10 Call For Abstracts

posted Aug 20, 2010 4:28 AM by Peter Wright

The NGS Innovation Forum '10 will be held at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on the 23rd - 24th November 2010.

The two day event will showcase the impact that the NGS has had on research in the UK, allow delegates to find out more about using the NGS in applied research, enable IT staff to find out how their institution can benefit from the NGS, and how you can contribute to and influence the future development of the NGS.

At the Innovation Forum there will be a poster session featuring peer reviewed posters from NGS users highlighting their use of the NGS and the impact it has had on their research. 

The abstracts will be reviewed by members of the Programme Committee for the event who include NGS staff, researchers, IT support staff and top NGS users. A prize for best poster will be offered with voting performed by delegates at a dedicated poster viewing session on Tuesday evening. 

For more details please see the call for abstracts website.  The deadline for abstracts is the 10th of September.

Guide: UK e-Science Certificates and Google Chrome

posted Aug 5, 2010 3:36 AM by Peter Wright

This guide shows how to use a UK e-Science certificate with Google Chrome under Linux and has been tested with Google Chrome 6.0.472.14 dev channel build.

As per the instructions on http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxCertManagement if you're using Ubuntu run:

sudo apt-get install libnss3-tools

Now we'll download, convert and insert the CA certificates:

# Convert CA PEMs into DER
curl "http://ca.grid-support.ac.uk/pub/certs/new-escience-root.pem" | openssl x509 -inform pem -outform der -out root.der
curl "http://ca.grid-support.ac.uk/pub/certs/new-escience-ca.pem" | openssl x509 -inform pem -outform der -out ca.der

# Make Chrome trust the e-Science CA
certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -A -t "C,," -n "UK e-Science Root" -i root.der
certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -A -t "C,," -n "UK e-Science CA" -i ca.der

Finally we can import your user certificate; this is stored in user-cert.p12 on my system (as exported from Firefox certificate store). If you do not wish to authenticate via your e-Science Certificate--for example if you simply wanted Chrome to trust the UK e-Science CA--then you can skip this step.

# Import personal certificate
pk12util -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -i user-cert.p12

Now we're done you can view your certificate store:

#List the store contents
certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -L

Certificate Nickname Trust Attributes
SSL,S/MIME,JAR/XPI
UK e-Science Root C,,
UK e-Science CA C,,
your name here - eScienceCA u,u,u

Now you should be able to go directly to a site which requires your e-Science certificate and Chrome should now trust webservers which use e-Science server certificates.

The Belfast e-Science Centre offers a hosting-on-demand service within the
NGS in support of UK Academic users--the service is used extensively by
BeSC's commercial partners but BeSC are keen to have more Academic users.
The service enables a remote user to deploy software into servers within
the BeSC domain and to manage these deployed services remotely. If
you have an interest in using this service please contact Terry Harmer
for details.

The BeSC service hosting cloud can be accessed via a web UI and using
an API BeSC are developing (currently called libcloud); a Europar 09
paper on libcloud is available on our website.
The API is intended to provide a provider neutral interface to remote resources such
as those provided by Amazon, Flexiscale etc and the BeSC hosting cloud;
plugins for all of these providers are part of the library.  If you have
an interest in using this library in your development and/or helping its
development please contact Terry Harmer.

Belfast e-Science

Navigation

Partners

Internal