Neil GeddesCCLRC Director, e-Science

Director, Grid Operations Support Centre

The UKNational Grid Service

Summary

• NGS Overview– Goals– Status– Use

Goals for NGS

• Provide coherent electronic access for UK researchers to all resources and facilities that they require to carry out their research.– independent of location of resource or researcher. – Common/standard Interfaces– Common/standard procedures

• Services support the interface and applications use it• Goal can not be achieved by NGS alone

– NGS will collaborate with • Resources and Resource providers • Users

– Researcher identity and authorisation will be established through standard institutional mechanisms,

– Close integration with international partner infrastructures

NGS partnership programme

Goals:

• Increase the range and depth of services and resources that NGS can offer to its users

• by enlisting partners

• Provide leadership and guidance to sites wanting to put their resources “on the Grid”

• by defining NGS compatibility and certifying compliant sites

• Two levels of partnership• An NGS Affiliate is a site certified to be NGS-compatible.– An NGS Partner is a site that offers significant resources or

services to NGS users.

NGS & Partners Today

Baseline Services

1. Storage Element Services SRB + SRM2. Basic Data Transfer Tools GridFTP 3. Reliable File Transfer Services RFT ?4. Grid Catalogue Services SRB5. Catalogue and Data Management Tools SRB6. Compute Resource Services Globus +GridSAM7. Workload Management +gLite WMS ?8. VO Agents ?9. VO Management Service ldap +VOMS10. Database Services Oracle & OGSA-DAI11. POSIX-like I/O Services ?12. Application Software Installation by hand + hosting?13. Job Monitoring Tools ?14. Reliable Messaging ? (OMII ?)15. Information System BDII (GT4/OMII?)

NGS Users

Number of Registered NGS Users

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

14 January2004

23 April2004

01 August2004

09November

2004

17February

2005

28 May2005

05September

2005

14December

2005

Date

Nu

mb

er

of

Users

NGS UserRegistrations

Linear (NGS UserRegistrations)

Applications: 1

Text mining

LatticeBoltzmann

Molecular Dynamics

substrate complex product complex

ADP

ATP

Astronomy

Applications: 2Systems Biology

H. Woo et al, Phys Rev B 72 064437 (2005)

Example: La2-xSrxNiO4

Neutron Scattering

Econometric analysis

Climate modelling

Applications: 3

• Many, but not all, applications cover traditional computational sciences– Both user and pre-

installed software• Several data focused

activites • Common features are

– Distributed data and/or collaborators

• Not just pre-existing large collaborations– Explicitly encourage new

users– Common

infrastructure/interfaces

Other Applications:

•nano-particles•protein folding•ab-initio protein structure prediction•radiation transport (radiotherapy)•IXI (medical imaging)•Biological membranes•Micromagnetics•Archeology•Text mining•Lattice QCD (analysis)•Astronomy (VO services)

Conclusion

• National Grid Service has now been operational for 18 months– Funded through to 2009 and recognised

as strategically important

• Focused on Services not Technology• Ultimate success will be determined

by how many resource and users support the interfaces