17th March 2008: To GU Campus Grid and Beyond
What do the following have in common?
nanoCMOS electronics, clinical trials, epidemiological studies, geographical information systems, bioinformatics,
cardiovascular functional genomics, astrophysics, drug discovery, breast cancer tissue banks, visualisation,
social sciences, occupational data, biochemical pathways, brain trauma, high energy physics and paediatric endocrinology?
These are just some of the areas that are being explored within the National e-Science Centre (NeSC www.nesc.ac.uk)
at the University of Glasgow in a range of projects funded from an array of research councils in the UK and in Europe with a variety of domain researchers on campus and beyond.
The common denominator in these areas and the niche that NeSC at Glasgow is exploring is in development, deployment and management of infrastructures that provide seamless and secure access to computational and data resources often crossing departmental, institutional and indeed national boundaries.
This is achieved through Grid-based technologies linked with fine grained access control allowing collaborators to securely share their local resources or to access remote resources within the context of particular collaborations – so called virtual organisations in Grid parlance.
GU Partnership with NGS
In recent weeks, this notion of resource sharing has gone to a new dimension through the University of Glasgow becoming a full partner in the UK National Grid Service (NGS www.ngs.ac.uk) Through making available the major new ScotGrid campus facility – the largest resource currently offered by an NGS partner, and the IT services managed HPC facility to the UK and international community, the University of Glasgow is now leading the way in a wide array of e-Science or e-Research more generally areas. Whether it is evaluating next generation atomistic-scale transistors and their impact upon system design, looking at in silico development of novel drugs, exploring the genetic relationships between individuals or organisms, this facility and the services it provides is underlying a wide array of research possibilities.
GU to lead User Liaison activity
Glasgow was also recently chosen to lead the European-wide User Liaison activity for the UK, Ireland and France. For more information on the possibilities offered by the Grid or how to access and use these resources more generally, users may in the first instance contact Morag Burgon-Lyon ( m.burgon-lyon @ physics.gla.ac.uk ). The NeSC team are also happy to provide targeted talks and training for staff interested in exploring the possibilities offered through these systems – would be users or departments may in the first instance contact Prof Richard Sinnott ( r.sinnott @ nesc.gla.ac.uk ) Director of the e-Science hub at Glasgow.
