GENIEfy Network

Creating a Grid ENabled Integrated Earth system modelling framework for the community

GENIE Training Workshop

On the 24th and 25th July 2007, GENIEfy ran the second annual GENIE training workshop in the iLab at the University of East Anglia. The event was supported by the National Institute for Environmental e-Science (NIEeS), Cambridge. The aims of the traning workshop were as follows:

• building capacity in the GENIE user base

• strengthening the diverse network of GENIE users

• providing introductory and intermediate tuition on as many aspects of GENIE as possible within a 2 day course

• gathering feedback on the experiences of new users of GENIE

Programme

The workshop consisted of talks, lab and discussion sessions:

• Talks
  • Tim Lenton – GENIE background and scientific rationale
  • Gethin Williams – GENIE structure and technical overview
  • Sudipta Goswami – Aladdin (GENIE configuration in MATLAB)
  • Andrew Price – GENIELab MATLAB toolbox and National Grid Service ensemble run demo
  • Mark Williamson – ENTS (Efficient Numerical Terrestrial Scheme) module overview
  • Gethin Williams – Developing for GENIE: The subversion repository, code documentation etc

• Lab sessions
  • Gethin Williams, Sudipta Goswami, Andrew Price, Martin Johnson – Installing GENIE from the repository and getting it working. Command-line compilation, configuration and running jobs.
  • Bob Marsh, Tim Lenton, Gethin Williams, Valerie Livina – GENIE-physics experiment (worksheet on GENIE wiki)
  • Andrew Price – Contributing resource to an ensemble run using GENIELab and the Spitfire cluster
  • Andy Ridgwell, Tim Lenton, Martin Johnson, Sonia Roudesli, Gethin Williams – Running GENIE with biogeochemistry – eb_go_gs_bg_at experiments (worksheet on GENIE wiki)

• Discussion sessions
  • Tim Lenton – feedback, user support requirements, ideas for suture developments, technical issues.

Achievements

The GENIE training workshop welcomed approximately 25 ‘trainees’ from the UK and abroad (Europe and the US and Japan). As well as the training provided in runnning GENIE, they left having built contacts with key members of the GENIEfy project and other GENIE users, strengthening the GENIE ‘network’.

In running the GENIE workshop we set out to provide a good introduction to GENIE for novice users and useful sessions for more advanced users. Providing sessions that could suit both advanced users and novices who were new to unix, not to mention GENIE, was a challenge! However, in general the feedback we received was very positive (see below) and the sessions we ran were very well received.

One particular success of the workshop was the promotion of a ‘hands on’ attitude in the GENIE network: as a community modelling project. the boundary between ‘developer’ and ‘user’ is necessarily and beneficially blurred, as were the roles of ‘trainer’ and ‘trainee’ in the workshop.

Tangible outcomes from the workshop are as follows:

• Greatly improved documentation on the GENIE wiki
• New users of GENIE
• Online tutorials which work as standalone introductions to running GENIE experiments: physics and biogeochemistry
• Improved capacity within QUEST theme 2 projects to use GENIE as a core tool of investigations

Feedback

We didn’t reveive as much ‘formal’ feedback as we had hoped, but talking informally with people during and after the event, we found that most or all of the trainees found the workshop extremely useful and left with improved knowledge of GENIE and the GENIE ‘network’.

One common issue to many of the trainees was the lack of ‘scientific overview’ talks for some of the modules. We would have liked to provide such talks in the workshop but lack of time, and lack of availability of some module experts prevented us from doing so. We will attempt to improve on this for next year.

Improvements for next time

As well as providing more scientific content on each of the modules, we came across other unexpected issues which we plan to solve for any future training workshops, mostly associated with software, and particularly the limitation of not having administrator access to the lab machines (a problem we faced at all possible venues for the workshop). In particular:

• We were unable to run X-sessions from the lab machines, limiting our use of Matlab on the remote clusters on which we were running GENIE experiments. This was particularly an issue for using Aladdin to configure and launch model runs, and something we must solve for next year.

• The firewall at the University of East Anglia blocked a port which enabled rapid communication with the ensemble database server via the Geodise toolbox. This meant that Andrew Price’s ensemble demo and lab session involved a lot of waiting around whilst the sftp server timed out and then used a normal port. We didn’t have enough time for find a solution to this problem this time around, but we are aware of it for next time.

Acknowledgments

Without the help and support of the following people, the GENIE training workshop wouldn’t have been possible. We are in their debt.

• The National Institute for Environmental e-Science in Cambridge for funding the workshop and particularly Therese Williams for logistics – from travel expense claims to organizing the conference dinner.

• Jane Baker and Jeannette Baxter in the iLab, for their on-site help and for allowing us to use their excellent facility within the Learning and Resource Centre in the UEA library

• Rachel Henderson and Jimmy Cross from UEA IT and Computing Service for their hard work in ensuring the computers in the iLab had the software we requested and were ready for the workshop.

• Julie Harold and Matt Livermore, UEA High Performance Computing, for allowing us use of the UEA cluster and setting up guest accounts.

• Andy Ridgwell for use of his Cluster

• Gethin Williams and Greg Tourte for use of the QUEST high performance computing facility.

• All of the people involved in the training effort – whether official trainers or trainees who helped out.