JISC

The UK National Grid Service (NGS) provides researchers with access to databases and computing resources held at different locations from the comfort of their own desktops. It has just been awarded £3m by JISC and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to make the transition to a sustainable service over the next two years.

Since 2004 when the NGS started, hundreds of researchers from a broad range of disciplines have used its pooled resources to perform research that would have been impossible using the computational resources available at one institution alone. This has included:

• using state-of-the-art methods to calculate very accurate radiation doses for large numbers of cancer patients in South Wales
• testing the consequences of proposed social policies on a real, but anonymous, computer-based model of the UK population
• creating a model of the whole Earth environmental system by simultaneously running models of different aspects of the system, such as ocean circulation, atmosphere and sea ice, and integrating them.

The service began with four core sites providing data storage and computational power and access to a broad range of specialist applications. Now, the number of affiliates and partner sites, which contribute additional resources, has risen to 38.

In making the transition from a fully-funded project to a sustainable service, the NGS will shift its support from users towards their institutions, facilitating cross-campus collaboration and enabling institutions to more easily integrate NGS services with other computing provision. 'We will be supporting higher education institutions to do e-science in the broadest sense as part of their day to day research activities' says Dr Andrew Richards, Executive Director of the NGS. The NGS will also assume the role of UK partner in the European Grid Initiative, which seeks to integrate national grid capabilities across Europe.

'The new funding will allow us to continue to enable innovative research and to develop into a sustainable service, underpinning the e-infrastructure within the UK. The continuing commitment from JISC and EPSRC will also allow us to work closely with GridPP (the UK grid for particle physics) to play a full role in international developments in e-infrastructure,' says Richards.

For further information, please visit the UK National Grid Service or Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Read about JISC's National Grid Service programme or download the briefing paper.