National Grid Service

National Grid Service

The National E-Infrastructure Service (NES), now entering its seventh year, aims to help UK academics and researchers carry out their research by providing easy to use access to computational, data and other resources. It is funded by two governmental bodies, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and is preparing to enter its fourth phase.

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

With more than 500 users and twenty nine sites, the NES 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.

The NES and GridPP also form the basis for the UKNGI, which provides a link for UK researches into the European Grid Infrastructure international e-infrastructure.