The UK National Grid Service (NGS) launched its second phase on 12 September at the AHM2007 in Nottingham. The second phase sees an increase in data storage capacity from the current 46TB to 192TB at the four core sites (the universities of Leeds, Manchester, Oxford and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory).
'This upgrade to the NGS reflects the increases in scale of data storage and computation which are becoming ever more common place in today’s high tech world,' said Neil Geddes, director of NGS.
A full replacement of the existing four compute and database clusters was undertaken by Clustervision to significantly increase capacity at the four core sites for end users of the NGS. The current core sites combined now have a total of 580 dual-core AMD Opteron CPU's distributed over quad and dual socket systems with a ClearSpeed Advance X620 Accelerator board.
The NGS gives UK academic researchers remote access to large compute resources, data resources and large-scale facilities. Current projects include medical imaging simulations, earth science modelling and computational chemistry applications.
