Infrastructure:

This project will require advanced technical support which will unite services in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science with those of the UK e-Science Grid. Our project will draw on the expertise in the National e-Science Centre located in Edinburgh. We expect to receive significant support from the NeSC throughout the project. We request 10% of a grade 3 computing officer in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science and 10% of a grade 3 computing officer in the NeSC. It is possible that one person could hold both posts simultaneously and also be employed on other Edinburgh Informatics e-Science grant proposals, thereby collecting this specialist expertise and pooling the resources of several closely-related research initiatives.

Computing support for this project will entail:

• obtaining, configuring and installing tools such as the Globus toolkit, Condor-G, Java CoG Kit, IBM Grid Toolbox, ESC/Java, Houdini, SpecialJ, JUnit, Clover and others;
• designing, setting up and maintaining the CVS archive for the project;
• writing, running and inspecting the results of JUnit and Clover correctness and regression tests for Java code, including all necessary test harnesses and coverage analysis scripts;
• maintaining the software tools listed above as new versions are released or the operating system upgraded;
• participating fully in our fortnightly project group meetings, keeping the investiators appraised of new technological developments in Grid toolkits and infrastructure;
• writing Makefiles and Ant build files, producing binaries for various platforms, and packaging software for distribution (as RPMs, zipped archives and other formats);
• authoring and mounting Web pages and scripts to provide downloads of publications and software, developing Web Services interfaces for demonstration purposes;
• helping with user downloads and installation, anticipating that some of our users will be e-Scientists who are not experts in installing sophisticated software tools;
• maintaining mailing lists of users, developers, and reported bugs or feature requests;
• writing technical documentation, tutorials and user manuals.

A 10% secretarial post is also requested to assist the research staff and investigators in areas such as preparation of research papers and monographs, travel arrangements, advertising of posts, co-ordination of job interviews and other duties.