astronomy

MyGrid

MyGrid is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand MyGrid rather than just read about it. In short: The myGrid consortium produces and uses a suite of tools design to “help e-Scientists get on with science and get on with scientists”. The tools support the creation of e-laboratories and have been used in domains as diverse as systems biology, social science, music, astronomy, multimedia and chemistry.

Key takeaways

MyGrid belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect MyGrid to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of MyGrid from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The myGrid consortium produces and uses a suite of tools design to “help e-Scientists get on with science and get on with scientists”. The tools support the creation of e-laboratories and have been used in domains as diverse as systems biology, social science, music, astronomy, multimedia and chemistry. The consortium is led by Carole Goble of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK.

Tools produced and used by myGrid Tools developed by the myGrid consortium include:

The Taverna workbench for designing, editing and executing scientific workflows myExperiment for sharing workflows and related data BioCatalogue a public registry of Web services for Life Scientists Seek produced in collaboration with the SysModb: Systems Biology of Micro-Organisms DataBase Finding, sharing and exchanging data, models and processes in Systems Biology MethodBox Browse datasets and share knowledge. RightField Sharing the meaning of your data by embedding ontology annotation in spreadsheets The Kidney and Urinary Pathway Database (KUPKB) Workflows for Ever (wf4ever) Scientific workflow preservation

History The consortium has three distinct phases:

Phase 1 The consortium was formed in 2001, bringing together collaborators at the Universities of Manchester, Southampton, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield, The European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge, and industrial partners GlaxoSmithKline, Merck KGaA, AstraZeneca, Sun Microsystems, IBM, GeneticXchange, Epistemics and Cerebra, (formerly Network Inference). The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funded the first phase of the project with £3.5 million. To date, Grid development has focused on the basic issues of storage, computation and resource management needed to make a global scientific community's information and tools accessible in a high performance environment. However, from an e-Science viewpoint, the purpose of the Grid is to deliver a collaborative and supportive environment that allows geographically distributed scientists to achieve research goals more effectively. MyGrid will design, develop and demonstrate higher level functionalities over an existing Grid infrastructure that support scientists in making use of complex distributed resources. The project has developed an e-Science workbench called Taverna that supports:

the scientific process of experimental investigation, evidence accumulation and result assimilation; the scientist's use of the community's information; and scientific collaboration, allowing dynamic groupings to tackle emergent research problems. The myGrid project has also developed myExperiment to allow sharing of scientific workflows from Taverna and other Scientific workflow systems. The Taverna workbench supports individual scientists by providing personalisation facilities relating to resource selection, data management and process enactment. The design and development activity will be informed by and evaluated using problems in bioinformatics, which is characterised by a highly distributed community, with many shared tools resources. myGrid will develop two application environments, one that supports individual scientists in the analysis of functional genomic data, and another that supports the annotation of a pattern database. Both of these tasks require explicit representation and enactment of scientific processes, and have challenging performance requirements.

Phase 2 In phase 2, from 2006 to 2009, the consortium is funded for £2 million as part of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute. The membership of the consortium was concentrated in the University of Manchester and EMBL-EBI.

Phase 3 In December 2008, the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council approved the team's renewal grant proposal. The grant is for £1.15m and started in January 2009. The members of the myGrid team for Phase 3 are the University of Manchester and the University of Southampton. The project is organised around 4 themes: Knowledge Management for e-Science, Metadata management in e-Laboratories, Scientific Workflow Design, Management and Enactment, and Social Computing for e-Scientists. The Social Computing theme is oriented around the myExperiment Virtual research environment (VRE) for the social curation and sharing of scientific Research Objects.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with MyGrid

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what MyGrid claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to MyGrid before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about MyGrid ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of MyGrid

In research: MyGrid appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses MyGrid in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: MyGrid is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Bioinformatics, College and university associations and consortia in the United Kingdom, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for MyGrid outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study MyGrid in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what MyGrid means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain MyGrid out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is MyGrid in simple terms?

Why does MyGrid matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study MyGrid?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on MyGrid.