United Kingdom
From EGI Knowledge Base
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| NGI Full Name: | UK National Grid Service |
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| Acronym: | NGS |
| URL: | http://www.ngs.ac.uk |
The UK National Grid Service (NGS) aims to provide 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.
NGS was established in April 2004 operated by the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils (CCLRC), now the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
| Number of users with valid Grid Certificate: | approx 3000 certificates, 400 direct users of NGS |
| Number of sites (Resource Centres): | 10 to 20 |
| Number of CPUs: | 400 - 2000 |
| Total storage (in TB): |
Contents |
[edit] EGI Functions: Current Rating
[edit] Functions proposed in survey of late 2006
| Coordination of infrastructure operations | Quite Important |
| Testing, certification and validation service including middleware | Very Important |
| Managed resource centers to provide initial resources for new user communities | No Opinion |
| Coordination of user and application support | Not Important |
| Coordination of dissemination and training efforts | Very Important |
| Representation of European Grid efforts on standards bodies | No Opinion |
| Representation of European Grid efforts with similar bodies from other continents | Quite Important |
Comments...
[edit] Other EGI Functions
- development/ specification of cleaner and more atomic interfaces to a more flexible range of services which make up the grid infrastructure.
- support for data providers and integration and not just compute cycles and storage.
[edit] Computing Resources
The following range of resources are available at the Core NGS sites:
The STFC-RAL Data Cluster provides: Master/Interactive node with 4 dual-core Opteron 64-bit processors, 32GB RAM; 48 nodes with 2 dual-core Opteron 64-bit processors, 8GB RAM; 8 nodes with 4 dual-core Opteron 64-bit processors, 32GB RAM; 8 file server nodes.
The Oxford NGS nodes are located at Oxford University and are based on two ClusterVision high performance Beowulf-type compute clusters:
Oxford NGS2:
1. 48 dual CPU/dual core compute nodes with AMD Opteron 285 2.6GHz CPUs with 8Gb RAM and 8 quad CPU/dual core compute nodes with AMD Opteron 885 2.6 GHz CPUs with 32Gb RAM, 2. 30TB RAID SAN and 3 dual CPU storage nodes. 3. a quad CPU/quad core head node with AMD Opteron 885 2.6GHz CPUs with 32Gb RAM 4. Gigabit network interconnects, 5. Myrinet high-speed message passing interconnects.
Oxford NGS1:
1. 64 compute nodes with dual Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz CPUs, 2 GB RAM, 2. a disk server node with 2 x 3.06 Ghz processors, 2 GB memory, 2 x 2TB RAID, 3. a head node with 2 x 3.06 Ghz processors, 4GB memory, 4. Gigabit network interconnects, 5. Myrinet high-speed message passing interconnects.
The head nodes acts as a front-end to compute nodes which are used for executing jobs submitted via Globus and the PBSPro scheduling system.
The Leeds site offers:
64 Dual CPU 3.06GHz (1M cache) Nodes 2Gb Memory per Node, 128 Gb Memory in Total 2X 120Gb IDE Disks (1 Boot, 1 Data) Gigabit Network Myrinet M3F-PCIXD-2 Network Disk Server as Node with 2X Infortrend 2.1Tb U16U SCSI Arrays
The Manchester Site offers:
20 Dual CPU 3.06 GHz Nodes 4Gb Memory per Node, 80 Gb in Total 2X 120Gb IDE Disks(1 Boot, 1 Data) Gigabit Network Myrinet M3F-PCIXD-2 Network 18Tb Fibre SAN (Infortrend F16F 4.1Tb Fibre Arrays)
HPCx offers approx 1600 IBM Power-4 CPUS. Organised as a cluster of multiple 32 CPU systems, with fast interconnects.
Additional resources are available at partner sites and Affiliates.
NGS allows users to choose which machine to run code on if they wish, or allows job submission through a broker. Given the range of architectures available, the informed user may make a better decision than the broker.
Access to resources is either through the NGS Application Portal to run supported applications or through the NGS Resource Broker based on the gLite 3.0 WMS-LB and UI nodes from the EGEE Project.
[edit] NGS and VO
NGS users join and use the NGS as individual users, and do not yet use VO.
The NGS operates a VOMS for the regional UKandI VO ngs.ac.uk on EGEE which all users of the NGS service in the UK become members of in order to access resources through EGEE. This is seen as a good way to introduce users of the NGI to the mechanisms of EGEE.
[edit] Monitoring and Accounting
The Resource Broker is monitored.
Statistics are available in reports on site performance, website performance, certificates issued, helpdesk function, and user accounting.
[edit] UK e-infrastructure beyond the NGS
The UK e-infrastructure also includes the established services:
- Access Grid provision for multicast teleconferencing;
- JISCMail provision for academic mail lists.
