APPLICATIONS

The UK National Grid Service (NGS) passed a significant milestone in May when Cardiff and Bristol universities joined as the first non-founder members of the service by making some of their computing facilities available on the “Grid”. "This expansion of the NGS beyond its initial four sites marks a significant new stage of maturity in the development of grid middleware and the ability to provide a stable grid service,” said Tony Hey, director of the UK Core e-Science Programme. The NGS consists of separate but linked computing facilities held at different sites (nodes). Via a web portal on an ordinary desk or laptop, a user taps into this distributed resource to perform lengthy or complex computations or gain access to data resources held at different sites. Through the Welsh e-Science Centre (WeSC), Cardiff University now provides access to its Silicon Graphics IRIX cluster, and through the Centre for e-Research Bristol (CeRB), Bristol University is providing access to a Beowulf cluster of several hundred linked PCs. Neil Geddes, Director of the Grid Operation Support Centre, hailed this as “a major step in the development of the NGS as it moves to become core infrastructure for collaborative research computing”. The NGS started operations last September with four nodes funded by three central organisations - JISC, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Council for the Central Laboratory for the Research Councils (CCLRC). Bristol and Cardiff universities are the first self-funded full NGSpartners to provide nodes. The full NGS now includes computing and data storage resources at six collaborating institutions (the universities of Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL)) together with the UK’s HPC systems, CSAR and HPCx. Together these institutions provide integrated computing support to an increasingly wide range of UK researchers. Current projects range from medical imaging simulations through to computational chemistry and astrophysics. In addition, research datasets can be hosted on the two data nodes at Manchester and RAL for community access and processing. David Wallom, operations director at CeRB, sees Bristol’s membership of the NGS as key to raising the profile of grid computing within Bristol and the southwest, thereby increasing the opportunities to improve research output across the region. Jonathan Giddy, grid technologies coordinator at WeSC emphasized that being a member of the NGS “ensures our users get the reliability, availability and support expected from a production-level service”. As full partners in the NGS, Cardiff and Bristol will now have a key role in the continued development of the service, both technically and strategically, ensuring that it develops to meet the needs of their own researchers. The National Grid Service is the UK e-Science Grid, intended for the production use of computational and data grid resources. NGS is the core service resulting from the UK e-Science Programme. NGS is supported by JISC, CCLRC, and EPSRC.