A successfull software workshop in Istanbul
The WeNMR project (see www.wenmr.eu) organized in June a three days workshop in Istanbul around the grid-enabled software HADDOCK. HADDOCK in an information-driven docking software for the modelling of biomolecular complexes which is made available to end users as a friendly and grid-enabled web portal (see http://www.wenmr.eu/wenmr/modelling-software ).
The workshop consisted of one morning of lectures followed by four half days of hands-on sessions on computers. For the tutorials the computations were run on a local cluster at Utrecht University, running limited calculations. Participants were however encouraged prior to the workshop to get a personal grid certificate in order to make use of the full capacities of the software. This was very much facilitated by a very nice and smooth interaction with the Turkish CA. The EGI user support team was here instrumental in linking us with the proper persons at the Turkish NGI and CA. We provided the latter with the list of Turkish participants and they contacted and guided them through the registration process. More than 50% of the 34 registered participants to the hands-on sessions obtained a certificate and registered with our VO (enmr.eu) before the workshop (making Turkey well visible on our users world map). This enabled them to bring their own problem to the workshop and, with the support of the HADDOCK team, launch docking runs via the WeNMR grid-enabled web portal.
We plan in the future to organize similar workshops, concentrating around a specific software/portal, and hope on the support of the national certificatio authorities to smoothen the registration process. Such a model will of course only work if a significant fraction of participants come from a single country.
The next WeNMR workshop (also advertised on the EGI training market place) will take place in August in Frankfurt.
Alexandre Bonvin
