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Scientific Computing Technology

Team

• Dr Peter Oliver

Aims

The aim of Scientific Computing Technology (SCT) is to both develop and support the UK's e-Infrastructure (such as NGS and EGEE) and enable the STFC Facilities computational infrastructure to take best advantage of this.

Benefit to the research community

The benefits of an e-Infrastructure is that Researchers can concentrate on delivering quality science, developing national and international collaborations

SCT Technologies

 

National Grid Service

SCT leads the National Grid Service in collaboration with its partners to deliver:

• A National Grid Service for UK research that is open to all UK HEI institutions and fields of research, enabling access to greater and more heterogeneous resources.
• A robust grid operations and management procedures facilitating the ongoing development of an e-infrastructure ecosystem in the UK .
• technical leadership and provision of exemplar services as required to help to grow the NGS infrastructure and therefore increase the benefits to UK academia.
• certification of resources leading to improved and measured reliability. This increases confidence in the UK e-Infrastructure and decreases cost in provisioning local services.

Portal Technologies

The NGS hosts and develops the OMII-UK funded JSDL Applications Repository Portal JSDL Applications Repository Portal. The portal provides an easy way to access resources, browse and execute installed applications and stage/move data between different grid and non-grid file systems.

• The portal provides a repository of personal and shared ‘ready to run’ application templates defined using OGF recommended Job Submission Description Language (JSDL).
• Users can freely browse NGS app
• lication templates available under categories of interest (e.g. physics, chemistry, tutorials etc).
• The templates fully describe all of the requirements of an application and are ‘ready to run’ (providing a good starting point for new users).
• Users benefit from the shared expertise, artefacts and configuration captured in pre-published templates (e.g. contributed by domain-experts and NGS resource administrators).
• The portal supports data staging and file transfer between a number of different file systems including SRB, GridFTP, FTP, and SFTP.

Production Clusters

In addition to providing the e-Infrastructure required SCT also provide computational resources to STFC and the wider academic community.

• Scientific Computing Application Resource for Facilities (SCARF). SCARF will support STFC's computing needs (> 900 processors) offering a grid interface thus helping to embed grid technologies in the facilities.
• National Grid Service (NGS). STFC plays a lead role in the NGS service and manages a data node and a new NGS-2 Compute Cluster (256 processors).
• Minerals and Ceramics Consortium (Mott-2). A commodity cluster (256 processors) for the Minerals and Ceramics Consortium for their grant entitled "Simulation on the Edge"
• NSCCS. A compute resource (224 Processors) for the Chemistry National Service: Computational Chemistry Software.(NSCCS)
• As part of the SCARF infrastructure we manage a compute resource (~292 processors) for the Central Laser Facility CLF

Applications Support

SCT also manage an extensive applications base. This covers areas such as computational chemistry, bio-informatics and engineering. These applications are available using simple web based (portals) interfaces.