1. The National Grid Service Mike Mineter NeSC-TOE

2. Goal of talk Revision of concepts of the NGS Current developments
Overview of the course content

3. The National Grid Service
The core UK grid, resulting from the UK's e-Science programme.
Production use of computational and data grid resources.
Supported by JISC
NGS-2 began 3Q-2006

4. NGS Compute Facilities
Leeds and Oxford (core compute nodes)
64 dual CPU intel 3.06GHz (1MB cache). Each node: 2GB memory, 2x120GB disk, Redhat ES3.0. Gigabit Myrinet connection. 2TB data server.
Manchester and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (core data nodes)
20 dual CPU (as above). 18TB SAN.
Bristol
initially GHz Athlon processors in 10 dual CPU nodes.
Cardiff
1000 hrs/week on a SGI Origin system comprising 4 dual CPU Origin 300 servers with a Myrinet™ interconnect.
Lancaster
8 Sun Blade 1000 execution nodes, each with dual UltraSPARC IIICu processors connected via a Dell 1750 head node. UPGRADE IN NEAR FUTURE!
Westminster
32 Sun V60 compute nodes
HPCx …
For more details:

5. NGS Vision
Commercial
Provider
UofD
PSRE U of A H P C x
RAL
Oxford
Leeds
Man.
H E C T O R U of B U of C
NGS Core Nodes: Host core services, coordinate integration, deployment and support
+free to access resources for all VOs. Monitored interfaces + services
NGS Partner Sites: Integrated with NGS, some services/resources available for all VOs
Monitored interfaces + services
NGS Affiliated Sites: Integrated with NGS, support for some VO’s
Monitored interfaces (+security etc.)
General principle here: establish core and grow it: compute, data and operational services

6. NGS software Computation services based on Globus Toolkit
Use compute nodes for sequential or parallel jobs, primarily from batch queues
Can run multiple jobs concurrently (be reasonable!)
Data services:
SRB – vaults: virtual filesystem
OGSA-DAI: allows projects, data services,…. to expose their data to NGS users (and more)
GridFTP for fast data transfer
Also ORACLE database
Friday’s talks

7. NGS Software - 2 Middleware recently deployed Developed by partners:
Portal v2
GridSAM – alternative job submission and monitoring
Developed by partners:
Application Hosting Environment: AHE
P-GRADE portal and GEMLCA
Being deployed
VOMS support
WS-GRAM: GT4 job submission
Resource Broker
Under development
Shibboleth integration

8. NGS development Next 3 slides are a personal view
not (yet) reviewed by Development Board
NGS-2 has goal of 3000 users
Embracing current and new VOs is vital to achieving this

9. Grids: Where are we now? Early adopters Routine production
Unimagined possibilities
Research
Pilot projects
Networks
Web
Grids
is simplistic but seeks to highlight that:
1. the more compute-intensive, IT-aware disciplines have established user communities whilst awareness of the possible contributions to the arts, humanities, social sciences is growing, in part through pilot projects.
2. There is a long way to go before the use of grids is as easy as that of networks… the maturity of the applications and the grid middleware will bring that about…. But grids remain at their foundations basedon agreements between people – resource providers and VOs… so always effort to set that up.
3. Early production grids are now established.
“Unimagined” by many but imagined by some for decades.
Arts
Humanities
e-Soc-Sci
Sciences,
engineering
Early production grids:
International - EGEE
Service-oriented, workflow, “legacy” data
High throughput, new data
Types of use:

10. NGS growth -1
Data
Ability to expose data to grid use: national, project, institute,…
Project support (incl. VOMS)
Portal
Current users are in general seeking access to compute power.
The NGS had a focus on gaining users to buld the number of grid-aware researchers
Now there are initiatives to expand the “use cases” in the two axes shown
Recall that grids can be located in three dimensional space: computation, data and collaboration.
Current use cases
Collaborative research

11. NGS growth -2 Computation Workflow, service orchestration Data
Trivial parallelism, High-throughput
Current use cases
VO support

12. Also: Condor and Condor-G: campus grid – NGS interoperability
This course
Also: Condor and Condor-G: campus grid – NGS interoperability
Middleware recently deployed
Portal v2
GridSAM – alternative job submission and monitoring
Developed by partners:
Application Hosting Environment: AHE
P-GRADE portal and GEMLCA
Being deployed
VOMS support
WS-GRAM: GT4 job submission
Resource Broker
Under development
Shibboleth integration
Practicals
Friday afternoon: talk