GOVERNMENT

GridPP is set to continue for another three years, with the award of £30 million from PPARC for the third phase of the project. Announced last week by PPARC Council, the grant will allow GridPP to manage particle physics computing in the UK beyond the turn-on of the LHC, up to March 2011. Dave Britton, who will be Project Leader for GridPP3, commented, "I'm very pleased to receive the news of GridPP3 funding at a time when there are intense pressures on PPARC funding from many directions. I believe, in this perspective, the outcome is very good and recognises both the excellent work that is going on within GridPP at present by many people at institutes throughout the UK and the scientific importance of the imminent turn on of the LHC." The GridPP3 grant will cover five main areas:

• Tier-1 staff and hardware at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
• Tier-2 staff and hardware at the four distributed Tier-2s around the UK
• Grid support, including areas such as security and data management
• Grid operations, including an overall operations manager and co-ordinators for the Tier-2s
• Management.

Deborah Miller, who manages e-Science for PPARC, added, "PPARC is pleased to announce funding for the third phase of GridPP. The LHC project is strategic priority for PPARC and GridPP3 funding will allow the collaboration to build on its successful development of a production Grid for the UK, to build the infrastructure and operations team required for the crucial exploitation phase of the LHC and for other particle physics experiments." Although most of the posts are in specified areas, the GridPP Project Management Board are now planning how the funding will be distributed in a fair and transparent manner. They are also considering how to proceed in areas where the posts allocated in GridPP3 differ from those in GridPP2. SOURCE: GridPP