National Grid Service

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (November 2007)

The National Grid Service (NGS) provides free grid computing resources and additional services for UK academics. It is funded by several governmental bodies, including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

The NGS [1] provides compute and data resources that are accessed through a standard common set of services, the Minimum Software Stack[2]. NGS services are based on the Globus Toolkit for job submission and storage resource broker (SRB) for data management. NGS resources host a number of scientific software packages, such as SIESTA and GAUSSIAN. As well as providing access to compute and data resources, the NGS also offers training (through the National e-Science Centre [3] in Edinburgh) and Grid support to all UK academics and researchers in grid computing.

The NGS entered its third year of production and its second phase with an upgrade of the resources at the core sites [4].

With over 500 users[5] and thirteen sites[6], the NGS is rapidly expanding, with a mission to provide coherent electronic access for UK researchers to all computational and data based resources and facilities required to carry out their research, independent of resource or researcher location[7].

The NGS provides a link for UK researches into the EGEE international e-infrastructure [8].

Contents

[edit] Background

The NGS grew out of requirements within the UK to develop a production quality Grid Computing service for use by academic researchers. Prior to the establishment of the NGS the UK e-Science program funded the development of the Grid Support Centre and later the Grid Operations Support Centre (GOSC). These were both focussed on providing support for end users in the use of and development of grid computing.

Following initial successes by the UK Engineering Task Force in developing the so called 'Level 2 Grid', which was an ad-hoc collection of individual institutes committing a variety of compute resources for use within a Grid Computing infrastructure, the NGS was funded to develop this into a full service. Initially called the ETFp Grid, or Engineering Task Force Production Grid, this soon became known as the National Grid Service (NGS). During phase 1, from October 2004 to September 2006, the NGS worked closely with the separately funded Grid Operations Support Centre (GOSC). The success of this closer collaboration led to a natural evolution of the Grid Operations Support Centre and the NGS becoming a single entity. By the start of the current phase 2 of the NGS, which commenced in October 2006, the activities of the NGS and the GOSC were harmonised under the single project name of the NGS.

[edit] Services

The NGS provides the following free-to-use services to UK academic researchers:

  • The UK e-Science Certification Authority, which provides digital certificates to identify UK Grid users.
  • A web portal, the applications repository, which provides a graphical method for submitting jobs to the NGS.
  • A resource broker, which can determine the best site or cluster for a submitted job based on its requirements and the current workloads.
  • The GSI-SSHTerm, a Java-based terminal used to give command-line access NGS resources using GSI-enabled SSH.
  • Oracle databases.

[edit] Sites

All NGS sites provide common interfaces for users to access resources, but they are differentiated on the access they provide to NGS users.

[edit] Core Sites

The NGS consists of four core sites, funded directly by EPSRC and JISC:

Each of the four core sites has dedicated NGS machines and staff and also participate in the core distributed Grid support centre.

[edit] Partner Sites

Partner sites contribute part of their computer resources to the NGS for free. The partner sites currently consist of:

[edit] Affiliate Sites

Affiliate sites also provide resources to the NGS but with more conditions than partner sites. Sometimes they will not provide any resources to the general NGS pool, but simply provide access to their own users through the common NGS interfaces. Affiliate sites currently consist of:

More affiliate sites are currently in under discussion.

[edit] Research using the NGS

All academics in the UK are eligible to apply for a free account on the NGS. The science and research achieved using the NGS covers a diverse range of subjects, from the permeation of drugs through a membrane to the welfare of ethnic minority groups in the United Kingdom.[9] Other applications include cases for modelling the coastal oceans, modelling of HIV mutations, research into cameras for imaging patients during cancer treatments and simulating galaxy formation.[10]

As an example use of NGS, "The motivation, methodology and implementation of an e-Social Science pilot demonstrator project entitled: Grid Enabled Micro-econometric Data Analysis (GEMEDA). This used the NGS to investigate a policy relevant social science issue: the welfare of ethnic minority groups in the United Kingdom. The underlying problem is that of a statistical analysis that uses quantitative data from more than one source. The application of grid technology to this problem allows one to integrate elements of the required empirical modelling process: data extraction, data transfer, statistical computation and results presentation, in a manner that is transparent to a casual user".[11]

For more examples of research using the NGS see http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/content/blogcategory/60/193/ and the ICT in Higher Education supplement in[12]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ NGS [1]
  2. ^ NGS Minimum Software Stack, Oliver P, Richards A, Young S, Version 1.0, [2]
  3. ^ National e-Science Centre {http://www.nesc.ac.uk/]
  4. ^ UK National Grid Service Quadruples Storage Capacity, Grid Today, 17 September 2007[3]
  5. ^ NGS User Account System Metrics [4]
  6. ^ NGS Resources [5]
  7. ^ NGS Mission Statement [6]
  8. ^ EGEE [7]
  9. ^ The UK National Grid Service, Weeks K ERCIM news July 2007 Service-Oriented Computing 2007.
  10. ^ STFC e-Science Annual Report 2006-2007 Weeks K [e-Science Centre Annual Review 2006-2007]
  11. ^ Grid enabled data fusion for calculating poverty measures S Peters, P Ekin, A LeBlanc, K Clark and S Pickles [Proceedings of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting September 2006]
  12. ^ ICT in Higher Education, issue 8, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 20th October 2006