Background
The NES grew out of requirements within the UK to develop a production quality Grid Computing service for use by academic researchers. Prior to the establishment of the NES the UK e-Science program funded the development of the Grid Support Centre and later the Grid Operations Support Centre (GOSC). These were both focused on providing support for end users in the use and development of grid computing.
Following initial successes by the UK Engineering Task Force in developing the so called 'Level 2 Grid', which was an ad-hoc collection of individual institutes committing a variety of compute resources for use within a Grid Computing infrastructure, the NES was funded to develop this into a full service. Initially called the ETFp Grid, or Engineering Task Force Production Grid, this soon became known as the National Grid Service (NES). During phase 1, from October 2004 to September 2006, the NES worked closely with the separately funded Grid Operations Support Centre (GOSC). The success of this closer collaboration led to a natural evolution of the Grid Operations Support Centre and the NES becoming a single entity. By the start of phase 2 of the NES, which commenced in October 2006, the activities of the NES and the GOSC were harmonised under the single project name of the NES. The NES is currently in its third phase which will run until the end of September 2011.
Read more about this topic: National Grid Service
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