Imperial College London contributes major computing resources to the UK National Grid Service

Dr David Colling, e-Science Team Leader of the High Energy Physics Group at Imperial College London said “Imperial has been active in the UK Grid community since the year 2000 and it seems clear to us that the future is through greater co-operation between the different UK and European Grid projects as this is how we will offer our resources, efficiently, to the largest group of users. For this reason Imperial felt that it was important that we became part of the NGS”.

The first resource to be accessed through the NGS is a 408 processor Opteron based Beowulf cluster which runs RedHat Enterprise Edition Linux. However future resources to also to be accessed through the NGS include a 260 dual processor Intel/Linux cluster which will support high performance and high throughput computing and a 200 core Woodcrest cluster. Dr David Colling emphasised that “Imperial was committed to bringing a growing collection of resources to the NGS”.

Imperial College London is the first GridPP site to join the NGS and will therefore allow NGS users to share GridPP resources. GridPP has created a distributed computing Grid across the UK for particle physicists and it is this resource that NGS users will now be able to tap into. This means that all UK researchers will be able to access GridPP resources at Imperial regardless of their research area.