New agreement provides academic researchers with access to wide scale resources

The University of Southampton has joined the UK National Grid Service (NGS), the UK e-Science Grid, to give its academic researchers greater access to computer and data resources and large-scale facilities.

The University’s Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing will provide access to the Microsoft Compute Cluster Service through a CCS Globus Gateway, the first instance in UK of a Windows cluster being incorporated into a production level Grid.

The NGS provides coherent electronic access for UK researchers, who don’t have access to Grid-type resources, to all computational and data based resources and facilities required to carry out their research, independent of resource or researcher location.

A large proportion of the UK research community primarily uses Windows-based systems or is more familiar with Windows than other operating systems. The implementation of the Globus Gateway will allow the NGS to be accessed by a much larger number of researchers, who will be able to carry out research under a more familiar operating system.

Professor Simon Cox, Director of the Institute, said: "This is an exciting opportunity to offer, for the first time, Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server on the National Grid Service, where it will interoperate with other resources."

The University is well-known for its expertise in computational methods for design and analysis using Windows systems and Microsoft products. Southampton was also an early adopter of Web services for grid computing, and has built extensive expertise in this area.