What is e-Science, and what is the Grid?
According to the e-Science web page
of Research Councils UK, e-Science is "the large scale science that will increasingly be
carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet."
The Grid is the architecture that will enable the necessary access to and coordination of
heterogeneous resources, including data and processing power, around the world.
There is (so far) no single entity that can be called "The Grid", but there are
a number of projects deploying their own grids and developing the required
technologies. Most of these grids are based on various versions of the
Globus Tool Kit, developed by the
Globus Alliance,
and some are even interoperable to some extent.
There are many acronyms and other abbreviations used in the Grid
world. Some of them have been collected together by Joe Foster on his
Grid Acronym Soup page.
How is the HEP group at UCL involved in e-Science?
The HEP group is involved in a number of
e-Science projects, mainly focussing on
HEP applications and advanced networking.
We have two computing farms accessible via the
LHC Computing Grid (LCG):
- 48 dual-processor PCs forming part of the UCL
Central Computing Cluster;
- 17 dual-processor PCs forming a group batch farm, also accessible
to local non-grid users.
How can I use the Grid?
A good first step, if you are in the UCL HEP group, is to contact
me, Ben Waugh, at
waugh@hep.ucl.ac.uk.
You can also find a rough outline of how to get started on LCG on the
"Using the Grid" page.
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