National Grid Service Research Articles

Barrier seal improves UK gas grid compressor reliability

This case study provides details of compressor shaft sealing technology developed by EagleBurgmann Germany GmbH & Co Kg in conjunction with the UK's National Grid and Germany's Siemens Energy Service. It involves the use of a conventional dry gas seal in tandem with a newly designed coaxial-barrier-type seal, substituted for the existing carbon ring seal used in previous designs and considered the industry standard.

Speeding up systems biology simulations of biochemical pathways using condor

SUMMARYSystems biology is a scientific field that uses computational modelling to study biological and biochemical systems. The simulation and analysis of models of these systems typically explore behaviour over a wide range of parameter values; as such, they are usually characterised by the need for nontrivial amounts of computing power. Grid computing provides access to such computational resources. In previous research, we created the grid‐enabled biochemical networks simulation environment to attempt to speed up system biology simulations over a grid (the UK National Grid Service and ScotGrid). Following on from this work, we have created the simulation modelling of the epidermal growth factor receptor microtubule‐associated protein kinase pathway utility, a standalone simulation tool dedicated to the modelling and analysis of the epidermal growth factor receptor microtubule‐associated protein kinase pathway. This builds on experiences from biochemical networks simulation environment by decoupling the simulation modelling elements from the Grid middleware. This new utility enables us to interface with different grid technologies. This paper therefore describes the new SIMAP utility and an empirical investigation of its performance when deployed over a desktop grid based on the high throughput computing middleware Condor. We present our results based on a case study with a model of the mammalian ErbB signalling pathway, a pathway strongly linked to cancer. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Towards a virtual research environment for language and literature researchers

Language and literature researchers often use a variety of data resources in order to conduct their day-to-day research. Such resources include dictionaries, thesauri, corpora, images, audio and video collections. These resources are typically distributed, and comprise non-interoperable repositories of data that are often licence protected. In this context, researchers typically conduct their research through direct access to individual web-based resources. This form of research is non-scalable, time consuming and often frustrating to the researchers. The JISC funded project Enhancing Repositories for Language and Literature Researchers (ENROLLER, http://www.gla.ac.uk/enroller/) aims to address this by provision of an interactive, research infrastructure providing seamless access to a range of major language and literature repositories. This paper describes this infrastructure and the services that have been developed to overcome the issues in access and use of digital resources in humanities. In particular, we describe how high performance computing facilities including the UK e-Science National Grid Service (NGS, http://www.ngs.ac.uk) have been exploited to support advanced, bulk search capabilities, implemented using Google’s MapReduce algorithm. We also describe our experiences in the use of the resource brokering Workload Management System (WMS) and the Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS) solutions in this space. Finally we outline the experiences from the arts and humanities community on the usage of this infrastructure.

Grid-enabling Geographically Weighted Regression: A Case Study of Participation in Higher Education in England

Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) is a method of spatial statistical analysis used to explore geographical differences in the effect of one or more predictor variables upon a response variable. However, as a form of local analysis, it does not scale well to (especially) large data sets because of the repeated processes of fitting and then comparing multiple regression surfaces. A solution is to make use of developing grid infrastructures, such as that provided by the National Grid Service (NGS) in the UK, treating GWR as an “embarrassing parallel” problem and building on existing software platforms to provide a bridge between an open source implementation of GWR (in R) and the grid system. To demonstrate the approach, we apply it to a case study of participation in Higher Education, using GWR to detect spatial variation in social, cultural and demographic indicators of participation.

CCLRC Portal infrastructure to support research facilities

AbstractThe emergence of portal technology is providing benefits in developing portlet interfaces to applications to meet the current and future requirements of CCLRC facilities support. Portlets can be reused by different projects, e.g. the high‐profile Integrative Biology project (with the University of Oxford), and in different Java Specification Request 168 Portlet Specification (JSR 168) compliant portal frameworks. Deployment and maintenance of applications developed as portlets becomes easier and manageable. A community process is already beginning and many portal frameworks come with free‐to‐use useful portlets. As rendering is carried out in the framework, applications can be easily accessible and internationalized. Portlets are compatible with J2EE, thus providing additional capabilities required in the service‐oriented architecture (SOA). We also describe how Web service gateways can be used to provide many of the functionalities encapsulated in a portal server in a way to support Grid applications. Portals used as a rich client can allow users to customize or personalize their user interfaces and even their workflow and application access. CCLRC facilities will be able to leverage the work so far carried out on the National Grid Service (NGS) and e‐HTPX portals, as they are fully functional and have received detailed user feedback. This demonstrates the usefulness of providing advanced capabilities for e‐Research and having the associated business logic in a SOA loosely coupled from the presentation layer for an Integrated e‐Science Environment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.