GRID
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Grids are at the heart of the UK e-Science programme focussed on collaborative scientific research. Major IT companies including IBM, Sun and HP have Grid initiatives, and the Head of the UK e-Science programme was appointed as a Vice President of Microsoft. Analysts IDC have predicted that Grid Computing will be worth $12bn by 2007 (Role of Grid Computing in the Coming Innovation Wave, Humphreys & Melenovsky, March 2004), and with Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 currently in Beta 2, the accuracy of this estimate remains to be tested. The need to process large volumes of data, consisting of various combinations of numeric, textual and multimedia data, occurs in a diverse range of disciplines, including:
Our Grid Computing activities to date include undertaking an ESRC-funded e-Science project to fuse analysis of text and time series, demonstrated in the Financial Information Grid - FINGRID - project and hosting an e-Science day. We run a Masters module in Grid computing that explores the use of Grid technology for FINGRID applications. We will shortly be investing in further e-Infrastructure of 100+ processors and terascale storage to expand our existing capability of 80+ processors, courtesy of SRIF-3 funding. Within our current provision, we run Globus (GT3), Condor and OGSA-DAI jobs and services under Linux and Windows.
Surrey now issues certificates for e-Science which can be used to apply for access to the 2000+ processors of the National Grid Service (NGS). |
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For further information on Grid computing at Surrey, contact Dr Lee Gillam |
Grids harness resources for processing large volumes of data in
heterogeneous distributed architectures to solve highly complex
scientific and industrial problems. Grids exist as a variety of
geographically distributed computers and high-performance computer
clusters in combination with geographically distributed data
repositories and databases.
In addition to compute power, we have already commissioned an
