An Introduction to NGS Research and Development

The goal of the NGS is to deliver a production quality national e-infrastructure in support of academic research. This is stated on the website and mentioned at the roadshows.

Technology moves on and what constitutes a production quality national e-infrastructure changes.

The task of keeping up with the Globuses is the responsibility of the NGS Research and Development group. This is the first of a series of postings from Research and Development describing what we do.

Let us introduce ourselves: we are a group of people from STFC, Oxford, Leeds, Edinburgh and Manchester. We typically meet by acccess grid once a week and it is our job to evaluate and develop new services. These services may be suggested by people within the group or suggested by our colleagues in the Operations or Partnership.

The services we are working on can be broadly classified as...

Advanced Reservation

To provide ways of booking time on one or more sites

Middleware deployment

Simplifying and documenting the installation of the software needed to join a grid.

User facing services

Services intended to make life easier for end users

Data access

Ways of getting the data you want where you want it to be.

Cloud computing

Computing on demand.

If you want to know more, keep watching the blog for future R+D postings.