The Future of NGS
e-Science The Changing Landscape April 2009
Dr Andrew Richards
(Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, STFC)
Overview
• History of the NGS
• NGS today – Phase 3 and the Future
A Brief History of Time
• 2001 - UK e-Science Grid
– GridPP and others start
• 2003 - Initial grid service ITT
– 4 independent clusters to investigate provision of a grid service
• April 2004 - NGS pre-production service
– EGEE, GridPP-2
• August 2004 – GOSC proposed
– Coordinating NGS and providing central services
• September 2004 - NGS production service / GOSC
• April 2006 – NGS/GOSC phase 1 review
• May 2006 - NGS phase-2 approved
– More integrated programme
– EGEE-2 starts in April
• October 2006 – NGS phase-2
• April 2009 – NGS Phase 3 (transition to service)
Phase 3
• £3M over 2 years (JISC + EPSRC)
– (Edinburgh, Manchester, Leeds(WRG), Oxford, STFC)
• Focus on HEI
– Supporting HEI to join NGS and to support local
communities
• EGI / NGI
– Interoperation with GridPP + Others
Aims and Objectives
• The mission of the NGS is:
– To enable 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.
• To be successful, these activities must be increasingly
embedded in the routine operations of UK HEI’s and
research organisations.
– Expanded partner engagement, broader uptake of services
and distribution of activities.
UK e -Infrastructure
Regional and
Campus grids
HPCx + HECtoR
Users get common access, tools, information,
Nationally supported services, through NGS
Community Grids
Integrated
internationally
LHC
VRE, VLE, IE
ISIS TS2
The NGS Member
Institutions, March 2009
7
Overall Approach
• Support an open standards based infrastructure
• Develop and operate a policy and best practice framework for
the operation, inter-operation and sharing of research
computing services across the UK.
• A repository of appropriate user and system documentation.
• The ongoing review of member services
• A UK help desk and support centre, integrated into related
international developments
• Operation of the core services required to support coherent
exploitation of the full range of UK e-resources for research
• Targeted training and outreach
NGS will
• Deploy and support the services required to operate collaborative
data and computation services in the UK
• Encourage and support integrated (SSO+grid) access to the full range
of the UK’s computation, data and other appropriate research
facilities.
• Providing support and training for inter-institutional e-research.
• Expand the community of e-infrastructure resource providers.
• Disseminate best practice in operation and use of e-infrastructure.
• Interface to partner international (grid) infrastructures.
• Collaborate with other national and international e-infrastructures in
appropriate research, development, standardisation activities which
form synergies with the NGS and its mission.
• Develop the business models and plan for sustaining the
infrastructure required to support UK researchers.
Some value added
services
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Common interfaces
Distributed virtualised data storage and access
Monitoring and sysadmin support
Accounting
Resource brokering
Application Hosting
– Traditional
– Web service
– Application Portal
• International gateway
– EGI
– International electronic identity
Challenges
• To drive the adoption of open standards
– Limited support for proprietary systems
• Enabling access to wide range of resources
– Expanding partner programme
• Integrating HEI resources and researchers
– Partner and user outreach
• Enabling community-led support programmes.
– Work with closely with research leaders and projects
• Promote and facilitate training
– Outreach, training, roadshows, PR
QUESTIONS ?