Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6.10
The NGS currently represents development efforts within the UK to create
a standardized infrastructure based on the requirements of today's users.
For future development the NGS has to look beyond the classic e-Science
communities and instead toward providing e-infrastructure that will
facilitate researchers across all disciplines and within all institutes. To
further this aim the NGS constantly works with funding bodies to under-
stand the requirement of their user communities and how best to facilitate
not only deployment of infrastructure but also embedding e-Science tech-
niques into researchers' day-to-day activities. Beyond the UK the NGS
also works to further its collaborative links with international grid efforts
such as the TeraGrid and the EGEE and participates in future discussions
over the role and requirements for initiatives such as the current European
Grid Initiative (EGI) which aims to facilitate sustainable grid infrastruc-
tures throughout Europe.
In order to engage further communities, the NGS must also tackle
challenges such as securing user data and green computing. For disci-
plines that use personal data such as medical data, being able to guarantee
that work undertaken using national resources is secure and cannot com-
promise that data is becoming increasingly essential. Similarly, with ever-
increasing costs associated with ownership and running of large-scale
infrastructure, the NGS must look to pioneering green computing, in
terms of how existing resources can be more fully utilized and how new
resources can be implemented in such ways as to avoid duplication of
effort and thus duplication of running costs, and how they can be deployed
with the lowest carbon footprint achievable using today's available mech-
anisms. The main premise for the NGS will be to continue to drive stan-
dards and to deploy and adopt standard interfaces for grid services across
institutes, thus making it easier for end users to make use of the grid.
Future of the National Grid Service
6.11
The strength of the NGS is in the wide range of communities that are cur-
rently using NGS resources to undertake their research. The current end
users of the NGS range cover the entire research spectrum from physical
sciences to the arts and humanities and include individual researchers
working alone, to multidiscipline, cross-institutional research groups.
The following case studies are more detailed examples of the current
types of research being done using the NGS. These case studies are
Case Studies
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