BIG DATA

The NGS has undergone a period of rapid expansion this year with a total of six new resources becoming NGS members. This means that the NGS, the UK’s primary computation and data resource for all UK academic researchers, now offers access to a far greater selection of resources than ever before, allowing users to perform cutting edge research better and faster.

The sites that have recently joined are the University of Birmingham, Brunel University, University of Liverpool, University of Sheffield and the University of York (which are both part of the White Rose Grid). The University of Manchester has also contributed an additional resource to the NGS.

The resources range from local clusters to the £2.1million SRIF-3 funded BlueBEAR cluster at the University of Birmingham which also provides a service to GridPP in analysing data from the LHC at CERN as well as the NGS. Paul Hatton, the Service Manager for BlueBEAR explained that “the University of Birmingham was pleased to offer increased resources to GridPP and new resources to the NGS communities as part of its SRIF-3-funded cluster. As well as benefitting these communities, the expertise and skills available within the NGS that is now available to Birmingham as an affiliate site will be of benefit to the University's wider research base”.

Brunel University are contributing resources from four of their machines but they hope to move to a larger cluster in the near future. Professor Geoff Rodgers, PVC for Research, stated that "Brunel was one of founding member of the UK contribution to the CERN grid, GridPP, a ground breaking production quality computational resource which is distributed around the globe. The primary goal of GridPP was to provide significant resources for science research with a high availability and efficiency. We have recently become a member of the NGS because it is will enable our grid resources to be more widely available to the wider research community and thus enhance the benefit to society."

The University of York resource consists of two clusters, the first of which provides three high memory nodes (32GB) with 8 cores each and the second cluster provides 24 nodes with 8GB of memory and 4 cores each. Professor Jim Austin, leader of the Advanced Computer Architectures (ACA) group, and Aaron Turner, software manager for ACA at the University of York, commented on the benefits of joining the NGS, "The NGS offers an excellent network of expertise and skills, and this is will be of great benefit, as will be the tools developed wholly or in part by the NGS. The community will allow us to develop wider collaborations with researchers which will be of mutual benefit. This will help us deliver value to our researchers, and it is all about delivering the best services for them."