Grid computing empowers collaborations across different institutions by enabling them to share resources of data and computation. Current developments using grid computing are in research ('e-Research'), engineering, public service, provision of digital data libraries.
The National Grid Service (NGS) is the core UK grid service resulting from the UK's e-Science program. It is intended for the production use of computational and data grid resources for scientific and academic research purposes. Use of the NGS is available to members of the UK academic and scientific communities. Projects involving large data volumes, high computation requirements or geographically widespread collaborators may benefit from using the NGS.
The goals of this course are to give participants:
An understanding of the concepts of Grid Computing and e-Research.
An orientation to the NGS and the Grid Operations Support Centre (http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/).
Sufficient practical experience to allow initial use of the National Grid Service in future.