This is the old Home-page of Stephen M^CGough.

I have now moved from Imperial to Newcastle University as the Research Manager for the Informatics Research Institute. You will soon be able to find me here.

These pages will be migrated over shortly.

I was employed as the Technical Coordinator for the London e-Science Centre based in the Department of computing, Imperial College London.

My interests lie in the process of performance optimisation in the Grid. This I feel can be achieved through workflow and performance data aware scheduling algorithms, performance modeling of Grid architectures and applications along with workflow optimisation (manipulation) techniques.

By making scheduler (the part which selects the resources to deploy work onto) aware of performance meta-data it is possible to better select the resources to ensure that the individual components of the workflow execute efficently. If we then make the scheduler aware of the entire workflow and how the placmeent of one component can effect the performance of others we can optimise across the entire workflow.

The collection of performance data from applications running on the Grid can be used to improve the performance of future runs. In an ideal world each component would be provided with a complete performance model for all resources it can be run on. As this rarely happens there is a requirement to automatically generate this information. Each time a component is executed performance data can be collected and automatically added into a store such that future predictions can take advantage of these new performance results.

When a workflow is submitted to the Grid it may be possible through inspection of the workflow and/or from meta-data about the components used to alter the workflow in order to improve the performance. This may include re-ordering of components, pruning the workflow of redundant components or the replacement of components/sub-workflows with semantically equivalent components/sub-workflows.

I am currently Lecturing part of the Grid Computing and e-Science course in the Department of Computing

Students for the course can find lecture material here
(note: you need to log in with your normal DoC username and Password).

You can view my publications from my online CV here. You can also view the papers for the London e-Science Center.

Here are some of my most recent publications:

Grid-Enabled Remote Instrumentation
A.S. McGough, A. Akram, D. Colling, L. Guo, C. Kotsokalis, M. Krznaric, P. Kyberd, and J. Martyniak
F. Davoli, N. Meyer, R. Pugliese, and S. Zappatore, editors
Chapter Enabling Scientists through Workßw and Quality of Service
Series on Signals and Communication Technology Springer, 2008

Grid-Enabled Remote Instrumentation
D. Colling, T. Ferrari, Y. Hassoun, C. Huang, C. Kotsokalis, A.S. McGough, E. Ronchieri, Y. Patel, and P. Tsanakas
F. Davoli, N. Meyer, R. Pugliese, and S. Zappatore, editors
Chapter On Quality of Service Support for Grid Computing
Series on Signals and Communication Technology Springer, 2008

A standards based approach to enabling legacy applications on the Grid
A.~Stephen McGough, William Lee, and Shikta Das
Future Gener. Comput. Syst., 24(7):731--743, 2008

Capacity planning and scheduling in Grid computing environments
Ali Afzal, A.~Stephen McGough, and John Darlington
Future Gener. Comput. Syst., 24(5):404--414, 2008

My CV is now available from here as a web page.
You can also download it in PDF format or Postscript format.

I run an informal Grid reading group within LeSC. We discuss papers relevant to the area of e-Science. Details for this have been moved into the LeSC Wiki Paper Reading Group [Access restricted].

Hmm, I'll have to think of something to go here.

Mail: Dr A.S.McGough,
        Imperial College London,
        Department of Computing,
        180 Queen's Gate,
        London SW7 2BZ, UK
Telephone: +44 (0)207-594-8409
Fax:           +44 (0)207-581-8024
e-Mail: asm@doc.ic.ac.uk