UK National Grid Service quadruples storage capacity for UK researchers

The second phase will see an increase in data storage capacity from the current 46TB to 192TB at the four core sites (the universities of Leeds, Manchester, Oxford and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL)).

“This upgrade to the NGS reflects the increases in scale of data storage and computation which are becoming ever more common place in todays high tech world. The UK's NGS continues to provide access to these large scale resources for all UK researchers” said Neil Geddes, Director of the NGS.

A full replacement of the existing four compute and database clusters was undertaken by Clustervision to significantly increase capacity at the four core sites for end users of the NGS. The current core sites combined now have a total of 580 dual-core AMD OpteronTM CPU’s distributed over quad and dual socket systems with a ClearSpeed AdvanceTM X620 Accelerator board.

The NGS gives UK academic researchers remote access to large compute resources, data resources and large-scale facilities. Current projects include medical imaging simulations, earth science modelling and computational chemistry applications amongst many others. Dr Blanca Rodriguez from the University of Oxford is a research officer on the Integrative Biology Project which looks at understanding what causes heart failure and how cancer tumours develop and grow. Dr Rodriguez emphasised the importance of the NGS to her research by stating that “I couldn't have done my research without the NGS, and with NGS2 I hope to improve the performance of my simulations even further”. The NGS will play an instrumental role in helping to understand two diseases that account for about 60% of UK deaths.